India has announced an ambitious full-stack artificial intelligence roadmap, making parallel progress across five strategic layers: applications, models, chips, infrastructure and energy, positioning the country as a leading contender in the next phase of the global technology race, the Ventura report said.
Speaking at the 2026 AI Impact Summit, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnau outlined what she called a “whole-of-nation” approach to AI, aimed at creating an ecosystem that is “frugal, sovereign and scalable,” according to the report. The strategy aims to make India a creator of foundational technologies and not just a consumer of global AI systems.
At the services layer, India’s leading IT companies are transforming from traditional software maintenance to an AI-driven delivery model. Companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech are embedding generative AI and agent workflows into enterprise products and collectively reskilling over 1 million employees for AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) opportunities. This transition is expected to redefine India’s global IT export profile over the next decade.
At the model layer, India supports a Sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) tailored for multilingual and India-specific use cases. The government-backed BharatGen Param2 (17B) model announced at the summit is designed to support 22 Indian languages and multimodal features. Indigenous platforms such as Sarvam AI and Krutrim focus on Indian language optimization, document intelligence, and cost-effective inference, establishing themselves as viable alternatives for corporate and public sector adoption in the country. While global models like ChatGPT and Gemini retain scale advantages, Indian models aim to compete on localization, affordability, and data sovereignty.
