Harnessing AI and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for Viksit Bharat

India’s DPI: A foundation built for scale

DPI is a suite of secure and interoperable platforms that enable delivery of public services at population scale. It is architected as a public good, providing common digital rails, standards-based interfaces and trust services upon which participants can design and deploy digital solutions. 
 

India’s digital transformation story is of a nation reimagining governance through technology and scale, with DPI evolving over the past decade from a vision of digital access to a model for equitable growth. It serves three interlinked purposes, inclusion, efficiency and innovation, which allows every resident to access essential services and entrepreneurs and institutions to reimagine public service delivery models. 
 

India Stack: Foundations for identity, payments, and data empowerment

A key component of India’s pursuit to become a digitally empowered society, India Stack is a set of open APIs that enables users to deliver online, paperless and consent-based services. It consists of three layers of APIs:

• Aadhaar provides a universal digital identity and powers 2,240+⁽ⁱ⁾ welfare schemes. 
• UPI, India’s default payments system, has processed 15,223⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ crore transactions since its inception. 
• Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) enables consent-based data sharing. Post-DEPA, formal credit access rose to nearly 92%⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾.

Together, these components form a reusable, interoperable public digital backbone, available to governments, startups, and private players. 

India’s AI transformation: From capacity to nationwide impact

India’s AI ecosystem has expanded rapidly due to affordable compute, skilling programs, and public infrastructure support. The IndiaAI Mission (INR10,300 crore^(iv)) is deploying more than 34,000^(v) Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) by 2025, creating one of the largest public AI compute networks globally. New semiconductor plants and an open GPU marketplace further strengthen hardware availability.
 

At the same time, India is building indigenous AI models, such as BharatGen, Sarvam-1, Everest 1.0, which are tailored to Indian languages, contexts, and governance needs. AI penetration in India is now the highest globally, with expertise growing 263%^(vi) since 2016.
 

In addition, efforts such as IndiaAI Ethics Framework, Skill India Digital Hub (SIDH), FutureSkills Prime, and Integrated Government Online Training (iGOT) Karmayogi blend technical capability with safety, fairness and transparency, supporting AI opportunities and AI pathways for inclusive national development.
 

AI use cases already at scale

These deployments show that AI is not futuristic, it is already influencing governance quality and delivering benefits of AI enabled governance for citizens.

• Grievance redress via Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Centralized Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS)
• Agriculture advisories using hyperlocal data
• Citizen support through chatbots on Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) and Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC)

AI-DPI Convergence: India’s next leap

The next phase envisions digital infrastructure that does not just transact but learns, predicts and adapts. This AI DPI convergence atop DPI rails unlocks three capabilities and strengthens AI transformation for Viksit Bharat goals:

• Predictive governance: Predictive governance uses AI to identify risks early, such as forecasting crop losses for timely insurance payouts, anticipating regional power demand, and flagging MSMEs at risk of closure for early support. This shifts governance from reactive to anticipatory and enhances AI implementation within public systems.
• Smarter regulation and service delivery: Fraud detection in Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes, high-risk inspections in food and labor departments, and automated grievance routing are early examples of AI-driven inspections, automated approvals, and algorithmic risk scoring improving compliance.
• Localized and federated AI: With India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, AI models must adapt to local contexts, federated architectures allow states to train models without centralizing sensitive data.

To fully realize the Viksit Bharat vision, India is strengthening three pillars that will accelerate AI-DPI adoption and support DPI for Viksit Bharat:

• People: Massive AI skilling in data governance, prompt engineering, cyber security, and AI ethics is building a workforce capable of designing, regulating, and operating AI systems.
• Infrastructure: National data centers, cloud platforms such as MeghRaj, and expanding High-Performance Computing (HPC) capacity enable AI systems to remain secure, reliable and affordable for states and startups.
• Governance: Responsible AI, DEPA’s consent-driven architecture, and evolving procurement standards strengthen India’s government technology and public sector technology foundations.

AI combined with DPI is redefining how India governs, delivers public services and drives inclusive growth. This convergence is a structural shift toward anticipatory governance, personalized public services and innovation on a national scale.
 

As India accelerates toward Viksit Bharat 2047, AI-DPI integration will be one of the country’s strongest levers for building a resilient, self-reliant, and globally trusted digital nation.