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AIKosha Platform
Context:
The Union government launched AIKosha on March 6, 2025, as a national platform for non-personal data to aid in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and tools.
Key Features
- The platform includes an AI sandbox with integrated development environments, tutorials, and tools.
- It is designed with AI readiness scoring of datasets, permission-based access, and strong security mechanisms (e.g., data encryption, secure APIs, real-time traffic filtering).
- The platform currently hosts 316 datasets at launch, primarily focused on creating and validating language translation tools for Indian languages.
- Other datasets available include health data, 2011 Census data, satellite imagery, meteorological and pollution data, and submissions from Telangana’s open data initiative.
Part of the IndiaAI Mission
- AIKosha is one of the seven pillars of the IndiaAI Mission, the government’s flagship AI initiative.
- The IndiaAI Mission has an outlay of ₹10,370 crore and aims to enhance AI development in India.
- As part of the Compute Capacity pillar, the government has made 14,000 GPUs available for shared access by startups and academic institutions to train and run AI models. Additional GPUs will be added quarterly to support AI model training.
Homegrown AI Foundation Model
- The government is also supporting efforts to develop an indigenous foundational AI model.
- This initiative has gained urgency following the success of China’s DeepSeek, which built a cost-effective foundational AI model compared to US firms like OpenAI and Google.
- According to Mr. Vaishnaw, there is high interest from Indian startups in building such a model.
Previous Government Data Initiatives
- AIKosha is not the government’s first attempt at aggregating public data.
- The Open Governance Data platform (data.gov.in) already hosts 12,000+ datasets from government agencies.
- The government has appointed Chief Data Officers across Ministries to encourage dataset contributions for use by researchers, companies, and policymakers.
