Govt Disburses ₹276 Cr To Set Up Four AI Centres Of Excellence

Minister of state (MoS) for education Sukanta Majumdar yesterday informed the Parliament that the Union government has so far disbursed funds totalling ₹276.1 Cr to establish four national centres of excellence (CoE) in artificial intelligence (AI).

Responding to a question in the Rajya Sabha, the MoS said that the four AI-CoEs are being set up at IIT Ropar, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore and IIT Madras. 

Majumdar said that funds worth ₹74.39 Cr have been released in favour of IIT Kanpur since March 2025, while IIT Ropar and IISc Bengaluru have received ₹62.64 Cr Cr and ₹69.07 Cr, respectively, during the period. Meanwhile, ₹43 Cr has also been made available for the CoE at IIT Madras.

The MoS also noted that the ministry released ₹27 Cr in favour of a consortium of institutions during a pilot phase, between March 2023 and March 2025, for the selection of institutions for AI-CoEs.

“The government of India has established three CoEs in AI as part of the vision to “Make AI in India and Make AI work for India” in the areas of agriculture, sustainable cities and healthcare following the announcement in the Union Budget 2023-24. These AI-CoEs are being led by IIT Ropar, IIT Kanpur, and IISc Bangalore respectively,” said the MoS in a written reply.

Majumdar also noted that the four centres of excellence have published research papers and developed AI models in partnership with a network of academic institutions, industry players and government organisations.

He added that the AI-CoE for education at IIT Madras has developed machine learning models, supporting Indic languages, for automatic speech recognition (ASR), optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT) and text-to-speech (TTS).

The MoS also noted that the AI-CoE for agriculture at IIT Ropar has developed models for crop, pest and disease identification. Similarly, the AI-CoE for sustainable cities at IIT Kanpur has developed large language models for air pollution attribution and urban flood prediction.

Responding to a question about evaluation of fund utilisation at these centres, the minister informed the Rajya Sabha that the progress of the AI-CoEs is monitored via a layered governance and financial monitoring mechanism. Elaborating on this, he said that an apex panel, comprising industry leaders and senior administrators, reviews the four institutions periodically. 

“An independent Project Monitoring and Review Committee is constituted by AI-CoEs for tracking the progress of individual projects. Additionally, the Central Project Management Unit has organised periodic reviews by external domain experts. The reviews have assessed progress in technology development against the approved deliverables, and financial utilisation,” added Majumdar.

The announcement comes a week after MoS IT Jitin Prasada informed the Lok Sabha that the Centre has approved 58 AI-CoEs and 543 data and AI labs across India. He then also said that IndiaAI Mission has identified 762 potential AI use cases at 62 ministries.

“A total of 686 fellowships have been awarded nationally across 178 institutions. Of these, 162 fellowships have been awarded to students from Tamil Nadu, comprising 96 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate and 32 PhD fellowships,” the MoS IT said then.

The AI CoEs are part of the Centre’s broader push to build an indigenous AI ecosystem. Under its flagship ₹10,370 Cr IndiaAI Mission, the Union government aims to expand access to computing infrastructure, support AI startups, develop indigenous large language models and create AI datasets. 

At the heart of all this is the homegrown AI ecosystem, which is projected to become a $126 Bn opportunity by 2030.

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