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FM Nirmala Sitharaman announced today that a centre of excellence (COE) in artificial intelligence for education will be setup with a total outlay of INR 500 Cr
Sitharaman said while announcing the Union Budget 2025
Additional infrastructure will be created in the five IIT started after 2014 to facilitate education for 6,500 more students
Presenting her eighth consecutive budget, FM Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday (February 1) announced that a centre of excellence (COE) in artificial intelligence for education will be set up with a total outlay of INR 500 Cr.
“Additional infrastructure will be created in the five IITs started after 2014 to facilitate education for 6,500 more students. Hostels and other infrastructure capacity for IIT Patna will also be expanded,” Sitharaman added.
Notably, three such centres, with a focus on agriculture, healthcare and sustainable cities, were announced in 2023. This time, the focus is to train individuals about AI implications in the field of education.
It was also announced that the government will be setting up five national centres of excellence for skilling.
In September 2024, the Union cabinet approved the establishment of such an excellence centre for animation, visual effects, gaming, comics, and extended reality (AVGC-XR), with an eye on creating IPs for domestic consumption and global outreach.
The announcement on the COE comes as IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently said that India was also planning to build a domestic LLM as part of the INR 10,037 Cr IndiaAI Mission.
On the same day, IndiaAI Mission sought proposals for Indian foundational models, which will be shortlisted on factors like innovation of the approach, scalability and sustainability, financial viability, and ethical considerations, among others.
Under the plan, the mission will offer “milestone-based disbursements” in the form of a direct grant and compute credits for AI compute.
This also follows IT minister Vaishnaw saying that the government has also selected 10 companies to supply 18,693 GPUs. This AI compute is also expected to be available to the startups that set out to develop an indigenously-built LLM.
While it remains to be seen whether the potential foundational AI model sees the light of day, hopes hinge on the frugality, innovation and talent pool of India’s startup ecosystem.
