Strong early demand from healthcare and education players is emerging as a key validation for India’s push to build sovereign AI models, with companies under the India AI Mission reporting interest from both domestic and overseas institutions seeking country-specific solutions.
Since the launch of the India AI Mission, many tech companies have aired plans to launch sovereign AI solutions for India. Among those, Fractal Analytics and Tech Mahindra—both part of the mission—said their offerings, slated for completion by 2026, are already drawing traction, particularly from hospitals and educational institutions looking for customised, locally relevant AI applications.
Nikhil Malhotra, Chief Innovation Officer and Global Head of AI & Emerging Tech, Tech Mahindra, said the company is currently engaged in multiple ongoing discussions across regions like Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia for its AI model. These talks focus on developing similar localised, sovereign AI models tailored to their linguistic, regulatory, and cultural contexts of each country.
In India, Tech Mahindra’s foundational model is one of the most downloaded models, indicating growing developer and ecosystem interest, as per Malhotra. The company plans to roll out the model across state and central government ecosystems in a phased manner once the solution reaches production readiness.
“For the education-focused LLM being developed in collaboration with partners, early feedback has been positive, with stakeholders appreciating its localized approach, linguistic relevance, and alignment with national priorities,” said Malhotra, adding that the model is currently in an advanced stage of refinement.
Meanwhile, Suraj Amonkar, Chief AI Research Officer, Fractal Analytics said the company received a very good response for their Vaidya 2.0 models from healthcare institutions. The models offer use-cases involving health chatbot integration and specialized areas such as report understanding, general wellness, symptom triaging. Further discussions focus on the use of models for specialized use cases.
“The Vaidya 2.0 models are foundational in nature and help with multiple use cases across various healthcare areas for both general users and specialized needs,” said Amonkar.
Aside from the abovementioned companies, businessline also reached out to Gnani.AI, BharatGen and Sarvam AI that announced sovereign models and related ambitions during the India AI Summit. However, the companies did not send a response up to the point of publishing.
Limitations in Enterprise
Despite the interest from healthcare and educational entities, companies could not confirm a similar response from enterprises. According to Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner in the Emerging Technologies and Trends, it is not easy for a service provider to simply adopt a sovereign AI solution.
“Customer experience, multilingual requirements, could use sovereign AI models. Beyond that, how much of that requires sovereign models? That’s the main challenge. It’s not generally applicable to all industries and all use cases,” said Verma.
Having attended the India AI Summit, the analyst approved of company roadmaps to build a holistic model while focusing on inferencing considering sovereign AI can be used more for such use-cases. However, she added that she did not anticipate an immediate push for sovereign AI that could escalate adoption.
Published on March 29, 2026
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