The Government of India has established three Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as part of the vision to "Make AI in India and Make AI work for India" in the areas of Agriculture, Sustainable Cities and Healthcare following the announcement in the Union Budget 2023-24. These AI-CoEs are being led by IIT Ropar, IIT Kanpur, and IISc Bangalore respectively. The total budget outlay for the three AI-CoEs is 990 crores.

To further this Vision, in the Union Budget 2025-26, a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Education was announced with a total outlay of Rs. 500 Cr which has been established at IIT Madras.

The financial support released under the AI-CoEs initiative is as follows. During FY 2023–24 and FY 2024-25, in the pilot phase for the competitive selection of institutions, ₹27.00 crore was released to consortiums of institutions. So far, during FY 2025–26 and 2026-27, ₹74.39 crore has been released to IIT Kanpur, ₹62.64 crore to IIT Ropar, ₹69.07 crore to IISc Bengaluru and ₹43.00 crore to IIT Madras.

The four AI-CoEs have published research and developed AI-models in partnership with a network of

academic institutions, industry and government organizations in order to address the challenges in domains of education, healthcare, agriculture and sustainable cities.

AI-CoE for Education has developed machine learning models for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Machine Translation (MT), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) which support Indian languages. AI-CoE for Agriculture has developed models for crop, pest and disease identification. Similarly, AI CoE for Sustainable Cities has developed models for air pollution attribution and urban flood prediction.

The progress of the AI-CoEs is monitored through the layered governance and financial monitoring mechanisms, including review by the Apex Committee, comprising of industry leaders and senior administrators. An independent Project Monitoring and Review Committee (PMRC) is constituted by AI-CoEs for tracking the progress of individual projects. Additionally, the Central Project Management Unit (CPMU) has organised periodic reviews by external domain experts. The reviews have assessed progress in technology development against the approved deliverables, and financial utilization.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Education, Dr. Sukanta Majumdar, in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha today.

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