C-DOT Partners IIT-Delhi To Build AI Disaster Warning Bot

SUMMARY

The proposed platform will provide real-time multilingual assistance to disaster managers, first responders, and impacted communities

The platform will also boast AI-driven decision support systems, emergency call routing, and multilingual voice recognition to enable efficient communication during emergencies

The chatbot will leverage technologies such as NLP, TTS, STT and image processing to automate communication services during natural calamities

The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) has joined hands with IIT-Delhi to build a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-powered chatbot for disaster warning and emergency communication.

In a statement, C-DOT, the research and development (R&D) wing of Department of Telecommunications (DoT), said that the proposed platform will provide real-time multilingual assistance to disaster managers, first responders, and impacted communities.

The platform will also boast AI-driven decision support systems, emergency call routing, and multilingual voice recognition to enable efficient communication during emergencies.

The Centre said that the upcoming chatbot will leverage technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT) and image processing to automate communication services during natural calamities and strengthen India’s disaster preparedness infrastructure.

“It will integrate with 3GPP-compliant emergency communication protocols to ensure seamless coordination during crises. Additionally, the solution will be fully on-premise, ensuring cybersecurity compliance, data privacy, and high availability for mission-critical applications. The solution will be integrated with the existing Disaster Management System of NDMA developed by C-DOT to enhance the capability of the platform,” the statement said.

C-DOT CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay said that the platform will address India’s diverse and complex emergency response needs.

The development comes a few months after C-DOT inked a pact with deeptech startup Trois Infotech to build drone-based solutions for facial recognition and seamless real-time data transmission.

Established in 1984 as an autonomous body, C-DOT operates under the aegis of DoT and has been envisaged with designing and developing telecom technologies.

Meanwhile, the development comes at a time when the government has pushed the pedal on developing indigenous AI technologies. InFor instance, in Budget 2025, the union government allocated INR 500 Cr to establish a Centre of Excellence focused on AI in education to develop AI-driven tools and learning solutions in rural areas.

Not just this, the Centre has launched an IndiaAI Mission to build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem with a capacity of 10,000 or more GPUs via public-private partnerships.

As a part of this mission, the Centre also invited applications from Indian startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs to collaborate on building an indigeneously-built foundational AI model. So far, the government has received at least 67 proposals, including from startups like Sarvam AI, CoRover.ai and Ola’s Krutrim, to build the large language model (LLM).