44% of IndiaAI Mission funds earmarked for compute capacity over 5 years: MeitY
This IAIC will develop and deploy of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.
The ministry for electronics and information technology informed the Lok Sabha in a written response on Wednesday that 44%, or ₹4,563.36 crore, of the ₹10,371.92 crore ($1.25 billion) approved by the cabinet for the IndiaAI Mission in March is earmarked for providing compute capacity of more than 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) over a period of five years.
Of this, 19%, or ₹1,971.37 crore is allocated for the innovation centre. This IAIC will develop and deploy of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.
18.7 per cent, or ₹1,942.5 crore, is allocated for startup financing.
This is the first time that the government has given the detailed allocation for the seven pillars under the IndiaAI Mission. The entire corpus is meant for a period of five years. Prasad was answering a question asked by TMC MP Sajda Ahmed.
The IndiaAI Mission will be implemented by ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC) of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
8.5 per cent, or ₹882.94 crore, is allocated for IndiaAI FutureSkills [sic] through which the government will focus on increasing the number of AI courses at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels, and setting up data and AI Labs in tier 2 and tier 3 cities to teach foundation level courses.
6.6 per cent, or ₹689.05 crore, is allocated for the Application Development Initiative.
1.9 per cent, or ₹199.55 crore, has been allocated for the Datasets Platform through which the government will make public sector datasets AI-ready and give real time access to data through APIs wherever . “The beneficiaries of the non-personal datasets curated by this platform are Indian startups and researchers for the development of AI platforms and tools, with appropriate security and privacy controls in place,” the response read.
0.19 per cent or ₹20.46 crore have been allocated for the safe and trusted AI pillar. Under this pillar, eight projects were selected in October to ensure “responsible development, deployment, and adoption of AI technologies”. These eight projects are on machine unlearning (IIT Jodhpur), synthetic data generation to mitigate bias in datasets and in machine learning (IIT Roorkee), AI bias mitigation strategy in health care systems (NIT Raipur), explainable AI framework (DIAT Pune, and Mindgraph Technology Pvt Ltd), privacy enhancing strategy (IIT Delhi, IIIT Delhi, IIT Dharwad, and Telecommunication Engineering Centre), AI ethical certification framework to assess fairness of an AI model (IIIT Delhi, and TEC), AI alogorithm auditing tool (Civic Data Labs), and AI governance testing framework (Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, and TEC).
0.99 per cent, or ₹102.69 crore, have been served for overheads and contingency at 1 per cent of the allocation for the seven pillars.
19 bids received to provide AI compute
On Tuesday, MeitY had said that it had received 19 bids to provide AI compute and cloud services. These bids will now be evaluated by the technical evaluation committee and the commercial bidding will be opened only for the technically qualified bidders.
The 19 bidders include Jio Platforms, Tata Communications Sify Digital Services, E2E Networks, and Yotta Data Services.
After technical evaluation and completion of the commercial bidding process, more than one company or consortium can be empanelled by the ministry. This empanelment will be valid for 36 months and can be extended for an additional 12 months. Through this empanelment, the government will make 10,000 GPUs available to start-ups, researchers, students and academics.
