AI Centres of Excellence in India

In late July 2026, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Jitin Prasada, gave figures in a written Lok Sabha reply. ANI reported it on 29 July 2026. It covered the IndiaAI Mission.

What numbers did the reply give?

• The Centre has approved 58 AI Centres of Excellence (AI-CoEs) across States and Union Territories.
• It has approved 543 Data and AI Labs in ITIs and polytechnics in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
• ANI reports that the IndiaAI Mission has identified 762 AI use cases across 62 ministries and departments. Storyboard18 calls them “problem statements”.
• 686 fellowships have been awarded across 178 institutions.

The 58 centres are to be set up with the State or UT governments and with industry partners. Two of the 58 are allotted to Tamil Nadu.

How many of the 58 are actually running?

Approval is not the same as a working centre. A PIB factsheet dated 13 August 2026 gives the status. Of the 58 approved, 22 have been approved and initiated across 13 States and UTs.

So the safe exam line is “58 approved, 22 initiated in 13 States/UTs, as of August 2026”.

What are the three tracks?

• Four national AI-CoEs. The Ministry of Education runs these. They are at IIT Ropar, IIT Kanpur, IISc Bengaluru and IIT Madras.
• 58 AI-CoEs reported by MeitY. As ANI reported, MeitY gave these numbers in the Lok Sabha. This lesson calls them “state-level” as shorthand, because the reply ties them to State and UT governments and industry partners.
• Three health AI-CoEs. In March 2025, AIIMS Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh and AIIMS Rishikesh were designated as Centres of Excellence for AI in health. They are a separate group.

How do you keep them apart?

• Ask which ministry answered the question.
• Ask whether the number is 4, 58 or 3.
• Ask whether the centre is a university-level research hub or a state-level set-up.

The live-article numbers 58 and 543 belong to the MeitY and IndiaAI track. The IIT and IISc centres belong to the Education Ministry track.

Think of them as one centre per big public need: farms, cities, health and schools.

What did Budget 2023-24 announce?

Paragraph 60 of the 2023-24 Budget speech set the goal. The vision was “Make AI in India and Make AI work for India”. Three centres of excellence would be set up in top educational institutions. Leading industry players would partner with them. The work would cover agriculture, health and sustainable cities.

Who leads each centre?

What changed for healthcare?

The centres were unveiled on 15 October 2024. PIB’s list of plaques named AIIMS and IIT Delhi among the lead institutions. In the August 2026 Rajya Sabha reply, the Ministry of Education named IISc Bengaluru as the lead for healthcare.

IISc hosts TANUH, the Translational AI for Networked Universal Healthcare Foundation. It focuses on non-communicable diseases such as oral cancer, breast cancer, retinal diseases, diabetes and mental health.

For a 2026 answer, write IISc Bengaluru. Mention AIIMS and IIT Delhi only if the question says “as announced in 2024”.

What did Budget 2025-26 add?

The 2025-26 Budget speech announced a fourth centre. It is a Centre of Excellence in AI for Education with an outlay of Rs 500 crore. The Education Ministry told Parliament that it is hosted at IIT Madras.

Two numbers matter: what was approved, and what has actually reached the institutions.

What has been approved?

• The Expenditure Finance Committee approved Rs 990 crore for the first three centres. The period is FY 2023-24 to FY 2027-28.
• The 2025-26 Budget added Rs 500 crore for the education centre.
• Together, the commitment for the four centres is Rs 1,490 crore.

What has been released?

The Education Ministry gave these figures in the Rajya Sabha in August 2026.

• Rs 27 crore went to consortia of institutions in a pilot phase, in FY 2023-24 and FY 2024-25.
• In FY 2025-26 and FY 2026-27, Rs 74.39 crore went to IIT Kanpur.
• Rs 62.64 crore went to IIT Ropar.
• Rs 69.07 crore went to IISc Bengaluru.
• Rs 43 crore went to IIT Madras.

Inc42 reports the total released as Rs 276.1 crore. Adding the five lines above gives the same figure.

How is this different from the IndiaAI Mission outlay?

The IndiaAI Mission has its own budget. The Cabinet approved Rs 10,371.92 crore for it on 7 March 2024.

The Education Ministry said the centres have published research papers. They have also built AI models with academic, industry and government partners.

• Education, IIT Madras: machine-learning models that support Indian languages. They cover speech recognition, text recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech.
• Agriculture, IIT Ropar: models that identify crops, pests and diseases.
• Sustainable cities, IIT Kanpur: models for air-pollution attribution and urban flood prediction.
• Healthcare, IISc Bengaluru: TANUH aims to build tools for early detection and risk prediction in high-burden conditions. The oral cancer app Aarogya Aarohan has already been launched. The National Health Authority has signed an MoU with TANUH.

Parliament was told that a layered system monitors the four centres.

• An Apex Committee of industry leaders and senior administrators reviews the centres. In October 2024, PIB named Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, as co-chair.
• Each centre has an independent Project Monitoring and Review Committee. It tracks individual projects.
• A Central Project Management Unit arranges periodic reviews by outside domain experts.
• The reviews check technology progress against approved deliverables. They also check how funds are used.

TANUH shows the legal form. It is a Section 8 not-for-profit company hosted at IISc.

Research centres need people. The FutureSkills pillar supports undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students.

What are Data and AI Labs?

The 2024 Cabinet note said Data and AI Labs would be set up in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. They would teach foundation-level courses. The July 2026 reply put the number at 543, in ITIs and polytechnics.

They train students in AI, data annotation, data curation and applied data science. Of the 543, 18 are allotted to Tamil Nadu.

Where did the first labs come from?

PIB reported in December 2025 that 31 labs had been launched with NIELIT and industry partners. States and UTs had nominated 174 ITIs and polytechnics for more labs. The 543 figure is the later one.

What about fellowships?

FutureSkills supports undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD students. PIB says support is provided to 8,000 undergraduates, 5,000 postgraduates and 500 PhD fellows. As reported on 29 July 2026, 686 fellowships had been awarded across 178 institutions.

Tamil Nadu students received 162 of the 686 fellowships. These were 96 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate and 32 PhD awards.

What is SOAR?

SOAR stands for Skilling for AI Readiness. The Skill Development Ministry launched it in July 2025. It offers students in Classes 6 to 12 three 15-hour modules. Teachers get one 45-hour module.

The Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission on 7 March 2024 with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore. The IndiaAI Independent Business Division under the Digital India Corporation runs it.

What are its pillars?

The Cabinet note lists seven components.

• Compute capacity
• Innovation centre
• Datasets platform
• Application development
• FutureSkills
• Startup financing
• Safe and trusted AI

The Data and AI Labs belong to FutureSkills. The 58 state-level AI-CoEs appear in the PIB factsheet’s IndiaAI section as a channel for innovation.

What is the latest progress?

PIB’s 13 August 2026 factsheet gives these figures.

• Shared compute grew to over 45,000 GPUs by June 2026.
• 237 projects had used subsidised compute by August 2026, covering 93.18 lakh GPU hours.
• 20 indigenous foundation-model proposals were chosen from 506 applications.
• AIKosh held over 14,000 datasets and 331 AI models by July 2026.
• 13 Responsible AI projects had been approved by July 2026.

An earlier PIB note, dated 30 December 2025, had put the GPU figure at 38,000. Use the dated figure that suits the question.

The Union Budget speech of 1 February 2026 did not announce a new AI Centre of Excellence. It did add two nearby items.

• Bharat-VISTAAR: a multilingual AI tool. It will link the AgriStack portals and the ICAR package of agricultural practices with AI systems. It aims to give farmers customised advice.
• A standing committee: the High-Level Education-to-Employment and Enterprise Standing Committee. Its terms of reference include steps to embed AI in the education curriculum from school level onwards.

The speech also lists the AI Mission among the steps taken to support new technologies.

Most questions test one of four things: the sector, the lead institution, the money and the ministry.

What are the safe pairs to remember?

• Agriculture goes with IIT Ropar.
• Sustainable cities goes with IIT Kanpur.
• Healthcare goes with IISc Bengaluru in 2026 (AIIMS and IIT Delhi in the 2024 announcement).
• Education goes with IIT Madras and Rs 500 crore.

What are the common traps?

• Mixing the four national centres with the 58 state-level centres.
• Mixing the Rs 990 crore (three centres) with the Rs 1,490 crore (four centres).
• Mixing the Rs 10,371.92 crore IndiaAI Mission outlay with the centres’ funding.
• Treating “approved” as “working”. Only 22 of the 58 were approved and initiated by August 2026.

Which phrase links the whole scheme?

“Make AI in India and Make AI work for India” is the Budget 2023-24 vision. It appears again in the 2024 launch and the 2026 reply.