The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Indian government has released a white paper titled “Advancing Indigenous Foundation Models”, outlining a roadmap to develop India’s own artificial intelligence models and strengthen the country’s position in the global AI ecosystem.
The paper is part of an ongoing AI Policy White Paper Series aimed at shaping the country’s artificial intelligence strategy.
The document highlights the development of indigenous foundation models as a key priority to ensure inclusive growth, public welfare, and alignment with India’s legal framework, values, and security interests.
Foundation models are large AI systems trained on massive datasets such as text, images, audio, and video.
These models can perform a wide range of tasks, including translation, summarisation, question answering, and text classification, and are considered an important layer in modern AI development.
According to the white paper, India plans to develop its own foundation models trained on datasets relevant to the country. This approach is expected to improve transparency, inclusivity, and alignment with national priorities while strengthening India’s role in the global AI landscape.
The document also emphasises the importance of both large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs). While LLMs can perform broad tasks across sectors, SLMs are specialised models designed for specific domains and are generally more cost-effective to operate.
In India, such models can be used in areas like agriculture, healthcare, education, and micro, small and medium enterprises.
The combination of LLMs, SLMs, and multimodal AI models is expected to promote linguistic inclusion, affordability, and energy efficiency, while enabling innovation in sectors such as climate, health, education, and urban governance.
The government is actively encouraging the development of indigenous AI systems through collaboration between public institutions and private companies.
Currently, many AI models used in India are developed overseas and trained on datasets that may not fully represent the country’s diversity. To address this gap, the government is prioritising local AI development as part of its digital infrastructure strategy.
-IANS
