The IndiaAI Mission signed a Memorandum of Understanding on May 16, 2026, with Bengaluru-based social impact organisation Karya to expand accessibility within India’s artificial intelligence ecosystem. Under the agreement, both entities will collaborate on data, technology, and capacity building to strengthen the infrastructure of AIKosh, the national sovereign artificial intelligence data platform. This partnership aims to build a culturally representative and demographically inclusive digital repository that supports homegrown research and development.
Elevating Accessibility in the AI Economy
The primary objective of the partnership is to make the benefits of artificial intelligence accessible to a wider section of the Indian population. By combining public administrative capabilities with grass-roots data collection methods, the collaboration seeks to eliminate barriers that have traditionally restricted the development of technology to a few large corporations and urban centres. The agreement focuses on building tools that represent the real demographic fabric of India, thereby making the domestic digital economy more democratic.
Ms. Kavita Bhatia, Scientist ‘G’ at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the IndiaAI Mission, represented the government during the signing. She emphasized that constructing an inclusive artificial intelligence ecosystem is impossible without datasets that represent the full diversity of India’s people and languages. This collaboration aims to leverage the unique, complementary strengths of both organisations to achieve this vision.
Strengthening India’s Sovereign AI Platform: AIKosh
A major focus of this partnership is the technical enhancement of AIKosh, which serves as India’s national sovereign artificial intelligence data and model repository. Managed under the IndiaAI Mission, AIKosh is designed as a secure, centralized hub that houses a vast library of non-personal, anonymized, and high-quality domestic datasets. By creating a unified repository of Indian language corpora, image databases, and sector-specific information, the platform aims to reduce India’s dependency on foreign datasets and proprietary technology models.
Beyond serving as a passive data repository, AIKosh functions as an integrated development ecosystem. The platform provides an active AI Sandbox and secure experimental environments that allow Indian researchers, startups, developers, and academic institutions to build, test, and validate their algorithms. The repository operates under strict regulatory guidelines to ensure total compliance with Indian security regulations, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. This ensures that all hosted data is strictly non-personal and ethically sourced, preserving citizen privacy while fostering national digital innovation.
The Strategic Pillars of Collaboration
The partnership between the IndiaAI Mission and Karya operates on a tripartite framework that covers data development, technology standards, and institutional capacity building. This structured approach ensures that the collaboration addresses the immediate need for data while building the long-term standards and skills necessary to support a sovereign digital economy. By addressing these three critical areas, the collaboration plans to build a comprehensive foundation for indigenous technological expansion.
The details of these strategic pillars and their respective focus areas are outlined in the table below:
| Strategic Pillar | Core Focus Areas | Targeted Outcomes |
|---|---|---|
| Data Development | Curation, development, and sharing of high-quality language and multimodal datasets | Culturally representative AI systems that support diverse regional Indian languages and mitigate demographical biases |
| Technology and Standards | Building robust model evaluation frameworks and establishing standards for dataset quality, validation, and interoperability | Seamless integration of data across diverse software platforms and high-quality, verified inputs for model training |
| Capacity Building | Organizing training programmes, specialized workshops, technical consultations, and knowledge-sharing sessions | Upskilling developers, researchers, and policymakers, while enabling government bodies to deploy advanced tools effectively |
Through these coordinated efforts, the two organisations plan to create a self-sustaining system where high-quality data directly feeds into standardized models, while a skilled workforce manages and expands the infrastructure. This technical pipeline will significantly improve the accuracy and speed of developing localized technological solutions.
Social and Economic Dimensions: Karya’s Ethical Data Model
Headquartered in Bengaluru, Karya was established in 2021 by co-founders Manu Chopra (who serves as Chief Executive Officer), Safiya Husain (Chief Impact Officer), and Vivek Seshadri (Chief Technology Officer). The organisation operates as a unique social enterprise that uses the high-growth artificial intelligence economy as a direct tool for poverty alleviation in rural India. By positioning rural communities as active, compensated creators of digital datasets rather than passive consumers, the organisation has designed an ethical data-sourcing model that stands in stark contrast to traditional crowd-sourcing practices.
Under its operational model, Karya pays rural, low-income workers up to 20 times the local minimum wage to record speech, transcribe text, and annotate images in their native languages. The work is facilitated through a customized smartphone application that operates offline, allowing individuals in areas with poor internet connectivity to participate and earn a dignified livelihood. To secure long-term financial empowerment, the organisation implements a data sovereignty framework where workers receive immediate compensation as well as future royalties whenever the datasets they help create are licensed or resold to technology corporations.
The Umbrella Initiative: IndiaAI Mission
The collaboration between the government and Karya is a vital component of the broader IndiaAI Mission, a national strategy approved by the Union Cabinet on March 7, 2024, under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The mission is officially administered by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and is implemented through the ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under the Digital India Corporation (DIC). With a total budgetary allocation of ₹10,371.92 crore spanning five years, the mission was formally launched during the Global IndiaAI Summit in New Delhi on July 3–4, 2024.
To build a robust, self-reliant, and responsible digital ecosystem, the mission is structured around seven distinct pillars. These core components and their primary objectives are detailed in the table below:
| Mission Pillar | Primary Objective |
|---|---|
| IndiaAI Compute Capacity | Establishing a public-private partnership (PPP) to deploy 10,000 or more high-performance Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for domestic developers |
| IndiaAI Innovation Centre | Developing and deploying indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and foundational AI engines |
| IndiaAI Datasets Platform | Organizing and securing nationwide access to high-quality, non-personal datasets, which includes the AIKosh platform |
| IndiaAI Application Development | Promoting targeted AI applications in crucial public interest domains like agriculture, healthcare, and education |
| IndiaAI Startup Financing | Offering venture capital and deep-tech financial support to domestic start-ups and innovators |
| Safe & Trusted AI | Generating governance guidelines and guardrails to ensure the ethical and responsible use of intelligence systems |
| IndiaAI FutureSkills | Fostering digital academic courses and vocational training to build a highly skilled workforce |
By linking Karya’s field operations with the IndiaAI Datasets Platform pillar, the government is systematically working to fuel the other six components of the mission. High-quality, representative datasets are the direct input required to train foundational models and execute application trials, thereby accelerating the entire national AI lifecycle.
Key Takeaways
- The IndiaAI Mission signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bengaluru-based social enterprise Karya on May 16, 2026, to strengthen sovereign artificial intelligence data infrastructure.
- The collaboration focuses on enhancing AIKosh, which acts as the national sovereign artificial intelligence data platform of India for research and development.
- Karya was established in 2021 by co-founders Manu Chopra, Safiya Husain, and Vivek Seshadri to generate ethical data for low-resource languages.
- The Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission on March 7, 2024, with a total budget outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore over five years.
- The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) implements the mission via the ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division under the Digital India Corporation.
- The national datasets platform operates in compliance with Indian regulatory frameworks, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.
