Government launches data
platform for Indian AI models,
beefs up shared GPU capacity
With the launch of the data platform, the government hopes to incorporate
datasets to help Indian firms build AI solutions with locally sourced data
Published - March 06, 2025 10:47 pm IST - NEW DELHI
THE HINDU BUREAU
Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said while announcing the AI Kosha platform that 14,000
GPUs had been commissioned for shared access, compared to around 10,000 when announced earlier this year.
File | Photo Credit: ANI
The Union government on Thursday (March 6, 2025) launched AI Kosha, a platform with
datasets, that is being touted as a home for non-personal data that will assist with
developing Artificial Intelligence models and tools. At launch, the platform contains 316
datasets, the bulk of these being programme to help in creating or validating language
translation tools for Indian languages.
The IndiaAI Datasets Platform is one of the seven pillars of the IndiaAI Mission, the
Union government’s main general State-backed AI effort. The Mission has an outlay of
₹10,370 crore, and last month the Centre announced that under its Compute Capacity
pillar, startups and academia would be able to use pooled access to Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs), which are needed to train and run AI models.
Other than translation, the limited datasets include submissions from Telangana’s own
open data initiative, such as health data, 2011 Census data; satellite imagery captured by
Indian satellites; meteorological and pollution data, and so on.
More GPUs
Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said while announcing the AI Kosha
platform that 14,000 GPUs had been commissioned for shared access, compared to
around 10,000 when announced earlier this year. More GPUs will be added on a quarterly
basis, Mr. Vaishnaw said.
The Minister also provided an update on the government-supported effort to create a
homegrown foundational AI model, an aim that has gained urgency following the success
of DeepSeek, the Chinese firm that was able to train and launch such a model at a
fraction of the cost that American firms like OpenAI and Google had to spend. “Now, the
team is actually inundated with how to evaluate these applications,” Mr. Vaishnaw said,
indicating a high level of interest from startups to build such a foundational model for
India.
Government datasets
This is not the first time the Union government has sought to aggregate public data to
nudge other entities to leverage it. The government’s Open Governance Data platform
(data.gov.in) currently hosts over 12,000 datasets provided by different government
agencies across India. The government has designated “Chief Data Officers” across
different Ministries and departments, encouraging them to provide datasets that can be
used by researchers, companies, and other parts of the government.
In 2018, the government constituted a committee to explore the possibility of compelling
firms to provide startups and government access to non-personal data, such as traffic
data from ride-sharing apps, to help new entrants and assist government policy. The
committee, led by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, submitted its report in 2020.
However, the proposals faced pushback from the tech industry, as private players were
reluctant to share their data with other parties. The conversation within the government
around non-personal data from private firms took place largely before the advent of large
language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
Published - March 06, 2025 10:47 pm IST
