IBM partners with MeitY to boost India’s deep-tech startups; MD outlines vision for ‘Digital Swaraj’

At IBM Think 2026, the company announced a partnership with MeitY along with Bharat Core. At the same time, it also made a strong pitch for Digital Swaraj.

IBM India hosted the IBM Think 2026 conference in Mumbai today wherein the company announced a partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). With this partnership, IBM and MeitY aim to transform India's deep tech startup ecosystem. It also announced Bharat Core at the event.

IBM collaborates with MeitY

IBM India Managing Director, Sandip Patel, at IBM Think 2026. (Shweta Ganjoo - HT)

By Shweta Ganjoo

Shweta Ganjoo is a Chief Content Producer at HT Tech. She has over 10 years of experience covering technology, during which time she has focused on consumer tech devices, AI, social media, gadgets, and tech policy, delivering authoritative and reader-focused insights across India’s fast-evolving digital ecosystem.

She began her career in the early 2010s, building a strong foundation in digital-first reporting as India’s tech landscape rapidly expanded. Over the years, she has worked with leading media organizations including India Today Tech, Indian Express Group, and Techlusive, where she played a key role in scaling editorial content and audience engagement. At HT Tech, she drives product recommendation coverage, combining newsroom leadership with hands-on reporting experience.

Her expertise spans smartphones, wearables, smart home devices, AI, and social media ecosystems, along with regulatory developments shaping the tech industry. Shweta is known for her analytical approach to product reviews and news coverage, grounded in hands-on testing and real-world usability. She has conducted industry interviews, tracked emerging tech trends, and produced research-backed stories using verified sources and expert inputs. She holds a masters in Mass Communication, which complements her professional experience in digital journalism and content strategy, and aligns with her academic background in technology. Shweta follows a reader-first editorial philosophy, prioritising accuracy, transparency, and fact-checked reporting to deliver reliable, insightful, and practical insights.

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As mentioned before, IBM and MeitY signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the company's IBM Think 2026 conference today. As a part of this partnership, MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) will work with IBM to give high potential deep tech startups in India access to IBM's portfolio of enterprise technologies and innovation platforms to solve business use cases.

The company said that select deep tech startup will get access to its enterprise AI, hybrid cloud and quantum computing expertise in a bid to enable them to build, validate and scale technologies for India and global markets. IBM will also provide technical guidance and enablement on technologies such as IBM watsonx, IBM Bob, IBM Sovereign Core, IBM's hybrid cloud, quantum computing, and security and automation solutions.

For the unversed, watsonX is the company enterprise ready AI and data platform that is designed to help companies build, train, deploy and govern AI models at a large scale. Similarly, IBM Bob is an AI coding agent for enterprises that automates the full software development lifecycle; while IBM Sovereign Core is an AI-ready, sovereign-by-design software stack that lets enterprises, governments, and service providers run and manage secure digital environments and AI workloads under their own complete control.

IBM said that as a part of the MoU, it will jointly work with MSH to explore initiatives that support startups across multiple stages of growth and across sectors including banking, finance, government and industrial. Furthermore, the collaboration will focus on enterprise proof of concepts (PoCs), sovereign AI innovation, open-source ecosystem development, founder mentorship, technical skilling and opportunities for startups to showcase their solutions to enterprises and investors.

IBM announces Bharat Core

The company said that Bharat Core sits on top of IBM Sovereign Core, which the company announced back in January this year, and that it's an optimised AI stack for India. Simply put, Bharat Core is a version of Sovereign Core that has been optimised for the Indian context. The company says that it guides users across the AI lifecycle by recommending the right building blocks and infrastructure.

IBM India MD pushes for Digital Swaraj

At the Think 2026 conference, the Sandip Patel, who is the Managing Director of IBM India and South Asia, also made a strong pitch for what he described as 'Digital Swaraj'. Digital Swaraj, as Patel described, includes not just storing data locally but also having control over it.

"As AI and all of these innovations [AI and post-quantum cryptography], move to the core of the enterprise. Who remains in control?...What happens when regulations change, or the geopolitical situation shifts, and suddenly the infrastructure you build your business on isn't available on the terms that you need? And this is where the whole concept of sovereignty, or what I, like, call 'Digital Swaraj' comes into play," Patel said in the keynote address.

"And this is precisely why we have been focused on building layers of sovereignty, building layers of privacy across infrastructure environments. It becomes really important to make sovereignty operational, giving enterprises control over their operating environment, data, technology, and AI execution. And this is one of the reasons why we built Sovereign Core...Sovereignty is not the choice between control and innovation. It is what gives enterprises the confidence to innovate and scale while remaining in control," he added.