AI Centres of Excellence announced in the Union Budget and by the Ministry of Education (2023-2025)

The idea of publicly funded AI research centres appears in India's first national AI strategy. NITI Aayog's June 2018 paper proposed Centres of Research Excellence (CORE) at institutions such as IISc, ISI and the top IITs and IIITs, with suggested funding of Rs 50-100 crore each, feeding industry-led International Centres for Transformational AI.⁸ Earlier government-funded AI hubs under the Department of Science and Technology's National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems included the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technology Park (ARTPARK) at IISc, set up in 2020 with Rs 230 crore of seed money from the DST and the Karnataka government, and the AI4ICPS Innovation Hub at IIT Kharagpur, which received a Rs 170 crore DST grant.¹

The Centres of Excellence discussed here are a separate line of announcements. The Cabinet's extension of the Digital India programme in 2023 included "three AI Centers of Excellence focused on sustainable cities, agriculture, and health", and MediaNama noted in 2025 that centres for agriculture, health and sustainable cities had been announced in 2023.¹²

2023. Three AI Centres of Excellence, focused on agriculture, health and sustainable cities, were announced in 2023, as part of the Union Budget for 2023-24, and the same three areas appear in the Cabinet's Digital India extension.¹²

15 October 2024. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced the creation of three AI Centres of Excellence in New Delhi with a budget of Rs 990 crore. The agriculture centre would be at IIT Ropar, the sustainable cities centre at IIT Kanpur, and the healthcare centre at AIIMS and IIT Delhi.¹⁵

1 February 2025. In the Union Budget 2025-26 the Finance Minister announced a Centre of Excellence for AI in education with an outlay of Rs 500 crore. MediaNama noted that it came on top of the three centres announced in 2023.²

Related centres outside the Budget announcements. On 25 October 2024 IndiaAI and Meta announced Shrijan, a Center for Generative AI at IIT Jodhpur, to support foundation models and generative AI research, and Meta pledged up to Rs 750 lakh over three years for the YuvAI skilling initiative.¹⁶ In November 2024 the Karnataka government approved Rs 28 crore to build a Centre of Excellence in AI in Bengaluru.¹⁷

The Budget-announced centres are funded directly by the Union government and are not drawn from the IndiaAI Mission's seven pillars, which total Rs 10,371.92 crore. The IndiaAI Mission's FutureSkills pillar, with Rs 882.94 crore, supports AI courses at undergraduate to PhD level and data and AI labs, and by February 2026 the government reported that 27 India Data and AI Labs had been set up and 543 more identified.⁹

The reported costs are as follows:

The sources reviewed do not say how the Rs 990 crore is divided among the three centres, who the industry partners are, or how the centres report to government.¹²

The announcements of 2023 and 2024 are consistent, but the sources reviewed contain little on implementation. They show no fund releases, no published governance charters, no list of research outputs and no deployment of the centres' work in agriculture, health or urban services. The 15 October 2024 announcement was reported by the news agency ANI and is relayed by Wikipedia; the ministry's own release and any later progress reports could not be retrieved for this entry.¹⁵

The education centre announced in the 2025 Budget is also thinly documented. MediaNama's February 2025 analysis of the IndiaAI Mission's budget speculated that the fall in the Mission's 2024-25 allocation from Rs 551.75 crore to Rs 173 crore might partly reflect reallocation to priorities such as the Rs 500 crore education centre, while stressing that this explanation was unconfirmed by official sources.³ MediaNama's summary of the Union Budget 2026-27 did not report any new AI Centre of Excellence, and instead recorded AI as a "force multiplier" within other missions.⁴

Centres of Excellence connect India's AI policy to higher education and sector-specific research, and they have a different logic from the IndiaAI Mission's compute and model programmes. The 2018 strategy argued that India's AI research was thin in quantity and quality and confined to a few institutes, and recommended a hub-and-spoke system of centres.⁸ MeitY's 2025 governance guidelines similarly stress capacity building, including training for officials, regulators and law enforcement and expanding AI education in tier-2 and tier-3 cities.¹⁰

The principal open issue is transparency. Without published budgets per centre, governance structures or outputs, it is not possible to assess whether the centres are meeting their stated purposes. That gap is notable beside the government's wider emphasis on compute, datasets and sovereign models, and the question of how the centres' sectoral AI work, in health and agriculture especially, will meet safety, privacy and liability expectations is not addressed in the announcements reviewed. The governance guidelines flag healthcare and agriculture as areas where AI adoption lags because of limited infrastructure and access to resources.¹⁰

As of 15 October 2026 the four central AI Centres of Excellence remain announced initiatives for which the sources reviewed give no completion dates or outputs. The Union Budget 2026-27, presented on 1 February 2026, was not reported to include a new AI centre. The sources reviewed did not confirm whether the education centre has been set up or where it is hosted.²⁴