India to Open Its AI Tools to the Global South
MeitY’s Krishnan outlines open ecosystem vision at Bhashantara 2025, while Google and industry leaders call for structural reform and resource unlocks
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India is willing to share its AI models with countries across the Global South, S. Krishnan, Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said this week at FICCI’s Bhashantara 2025 conference in New Delhi.
The offer underscores India’s growing emphasis on scalable, inclusive AI solutions designed for multilingual, resource-constrained environments.
Krishnan said India’s AI language systems are uniquely suited to lead in complex environments.
“If you can do it in India, you can do it practically anywhere else in the world,” he said, referencing the technical and linguistic demands of developing AI tools in India’s diverse context.
The statement follows interest from UN officials, who see India’s collaborative AI efforts as an alternative to centralised or commercially siloed ecosystems.
Krishnan cited the India AI Mission’s investments in AI Kosh, a repository of over 400 datasets, and in initiatives like Mission Bhashini and Anuvadini, which aim to build AI solutions rooted in regional and dialect-specific data.
“We are trying to ensure we are capturing not just the major languages but also the dialects and the regional languages,” he added.
India is also digitizing traditional knowledge systems to form the foundation of future AI training sets, especially in healthcare and academic research.
Unlike models driven solely by governments or corporations, India’s approach is designed to bring together academic, industrial, and public institutions.
Industry representatives at the event outlined operational and policy steps needed to scale impact.
Harsh Dhand, Research and AI Partnerships APAC lead at Google, said the private sector must step up through “access to technology, seed funding for startups and academia, and skilling.”
He urged the government to unlock historical data from institutions like Prasar Bharati and All India Radio, connect research entities to avoid duplication, and widen the definition of “Make in India” to “Made in India by India for India.”
Ajay Data, Chairman of FICCI’s Multilingual Internet and Universal Acceptance Committee, pointed to the commercial scale of India’s multilingual internet shift, noting that domain names are now available in all official Indian languages. With 6 billion people worldwide not using English as their primary language, the market for inclusive tools is enormous.
“We are no longer debating the possibility of a multilingual internet,” said Sandeep Nulkar, Co-Chair of FICCI’s Multilingual Internet Committee and Founder of BITS Technologies. “We are actually mobilizing around its urgency, not only in an academic manner, but also in a demographic and development and economic perspective.”
