The IndiaAI Mission is spearheading India’s sovereign AI push with initiatives like the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) to develop indigenous large multimodal models trained on Indian data and languages, aiming to boost global competitiveness in generative AI.

Vijay has been named Chief Executive Officer of the IndiaAI Mission as of June 5, 2026, signaling a new era of leadership alongside the Mission’s COO.

Sudeep Shrivastava, Joint Secretary at MeitY, steps in as Chief Operating Officer of the IndiaAI Mission, coordinating operations under the new leadership.

Under the prior IndiaAI leadership, 38,000 GPUs were activated and a shared compute infrastructure was established to support startups and researchers, setting a benchmark for the new leadership’s ambitions.

Kavita Bhatia will continue as Chief Operating Officer of the IndiaAI Mission, bringing extensive e-governance experience to scale national computing capabilities and enterprise AI deployments.

Launched in March 2024 with a Rs 10,372 crore outlay, the IndiaAI Mission has built foundational infrastructure and is advancing plans for India-specific AI applications and multilingual models.

Selected models and initiatives aim to be open-source friendly and accessible to government bodies, startups, and researchers, with financial support covering compute costs and an extra 25% of compute funding allocated for datasets and personnel.

Financial support for compute includes coverage of actual usage costs, plus an additional 25% earmarked for datasets and personnel to accelerate development.

Twelve teams have been shortlisted to develop foundational models or LLMs, and 30 India-specific AI applications have been approved, while thousands of students are being trained and 27 India Data and AI labs are being established, with 543 more identified for future work.

Selected consortia and organizations—including Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, Gan AI, Avatar AI, IIT Bombay Consortium (BharatGen), GenLoop, Zentieq, Intellihealth, Shodh AI, Fractal Analytics, and Tech Mahindra Maker's Lab—will build large and small language models from Indian datasets and contribute to open-source and government use.

The leadership shake-up follows the reassignment of the IndiaAI Mission’s former CEO to the National Testing Agency, creating a vacancy and prompting strategic restructuring.

Saurabh Vijay, a 1998-batch IAS officer from Maharashtra and IIT-Delhi civil engineer, assumed UIDAI leadership and will also oversee IndiaAI responsibilities, building on his prior role as Principal Secretary (Expenditure) in Maharashtra.