Washington, Dec 6 (IANS) India plans to unveil a new voice-enabled Large Language Model ahead of next year’s global Artificial Intelligence (AI) summit in New Delhi, a top government official, Abhishek Singh, has told the Silicon Valley community this week, outlining an expansive road map to accelerate the country’s AI capabilities.
Singh, Director General of the National Informatics Centre and Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT, said India’s rise as the world’s fastest-growing major economy is tied closely to its digital architecture.
“We are recognised as the world’s largest, fastest growing economy… growing at the rate of 8.2 per cent,” he said, calling digital public infrastructure “the basic foundation” for India’s AI ambitions.
India intends to scale its economy from “around $4 trillion… up to a $30 trillion economy by 2047,” he said, arguing that AI will play a central enabling role.
The foundation, he said, is India’s digital public infrastructure — Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, India Stack — which he described as “mind-boggling” in scale.
He noted that “around 27 countries are building Aadhar-based solutions,” and that nations such as the UK are studying DigiLocker-like systems.
AI, Singh said, will “help turbocharge our digital public infrastructure” by enabling services in every Indian language and allowing millions to access government schemes, healthcare information and agricultural support through natural speech.
“We have the potential of connecting the remaining 500 million people,” he said. Singh outlined major gaps that prompted the launch of the India AI Mission last year.
India, he said, had “only about 600 odd GPUs” across its ecosystem and far lower R&D spending compared to the U.S. and China. The government responded by working with industry to make 40,000 GPUs available at subsidized rates.
He said India also lacked indigenous AI models. “India did not have an LLM of its own,” he said. The government is now funding “almost 12 such initiatives for building Indian LLMs and SLMs,” including sector-specific models for healthcare and materials science.
Two of those efforts — one led by IIT Madras and one by IIT Bombay — are nearing completion. “Before the summit… we should be able to announce an Indian LLM, which will be primarily a voice-based LLM,” Singh said.
On data, Singh said India is building a national datasets platform — AI Coach — which already hosts “3,500 data sets from both public sector and private sector” to support training and innovation. He said India is developing 30 scalable AI applications, including an “AI assistant for farmers” and diagnostic tools for tuberculosis, cataract and diabetic retinopathy.
Such systems, he said, could address gaps in rural healthcare where machines exist but specialists do not. “That problem can easily be solved with significant level of accuracy by the AI machines,” he said.
A major component of the mission is talent development. “If we don’t invest in talent enough, we will be losing that advantage,” Singh said.
India is funding AI research, creating data labs in ITIs and polytechnics, and supporting students at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels. Safety, he said, is a central pillar. India has set up an AI Safety Institute and is developing tools for “bias mitigation, ethical AI certification, privacy preservation… detecting deep fakes… labeling AI-generated content.”
Singh said the AI Impact Summit 2026 will be the first global AI gathering hosted in the developing world. India aims to “democratize access to AI” so that countries outside the West “do not end up only becoming AI users.”
He said more than 100 countries, 15 heads of government, and 50 CEOs are expected in Delhi. Seven international working groups — co-led by India — are negotiating deliverables on inclusion, safety, economic growth, sustainability and science.
The summit’s outcomes, he said, will include a charter for democratising AI resources, an AI commons repository, workplace transition principles, an AI-for-science network, and AI Safety Commons. India also wants commitments from frontier model developers to share “usage data… with sovereign governments.”
India received 15,000-plus entries from 136 countries in its global innovation challenges, he said, calling it “truly global.”
“The whole summit… is about people, planet and progress,” Singh said. “Ideas will be most welcome.”
Participants at the event featuring leaders from Anthropic, Zoom, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Microsoft, Salesforce, OpenAI, Equinix and NVIDIA repeatedly underscored India’s rising centrality.
Anthropic’s Michael Sellitto said his company opened an office in Bangalore because “the opportunity in India is just really massive.”
Zoom executive Velchamy Sankarlingam said the company’s engineering and operations footprint in India continues to expand.
Dev Khare of Lightspeed called India’s data resources “a very important… national security thing for India to have its own models.”
A panel of global investors, including General Catalyst, WestBridge Capital, Celesta Capital and Prosperity7 Ventures, emphasized India’s role in shaping responsible global AI use.
WestBridge’s Sumir Chadha said, “India now has the second largest number of AI users in the world after the US,” adding that Indian consumers could soon be “more AI facile than consumers anywhere else in the world.”
Celesta’s Arun Kumar, a former U.S. Commerce Department official, said AI regulation and standards are emerging as a core India–US issue.
“There’s an opportunity to harmonize in the era of AI and build that trusted corridor that is often spoken about,” he said.
UN Special Envoy Amandeep Singh Gill, in a prerecorded address, said the Delhi summit — AI Impact Summit 2026 — comes as “AI has accelerated, so has multilateralism,” adding that the world must ensure “at the AI banquet, everyone needs a seat at the table.”
Google executive Ben Gomes, delivering the closing address, said he was “amazed” by India’s scale and potential, noting Google’s recent investments in data centers, learning tools, and sustainability technology. “We really believe in the role of the teacher… We want to enhance that connection, not replace it,” he said.
