Sovereign AI: India Bet Big on Its Own LLM — Is It Working?

India spent much of the past year chasing a single, politically charged idea: that the world's most populous nation should not have to rent its intelligence from Silicon Valley or

Strip away the flag-waving and sovereign AI is a claim about control.

For a country with 22 official languages and well over a billion people who mostly do not think in English, that gap is not academic.

The scaffolding for all this is the IndiaAI Mission, a roughly ₹10,370 crore programme approved in 2024.

The mission is also funding model-building directly.