New Delhi, Dec 16 (IANS) In a bid to support India’s research ecosystem, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, on Tuesday announced a funding of $8 million for four AI Centres of Excellence for health, agriculture, education, and sustainable cities.
The centres were established by the Government, aligning with the vision to “Make AI in India and Make AI work for India”.
The centres include TANUH at IISc Bangalore, which will focus on developing scalable AI solutions for effective treatment of non-communicable diseases; Airawat Research Foundation at IIT Kanpur, which will focus on pioneering research on AI to transform urban governance.
The AI Centre of Excellence for Education at IIT Madras will focus on developing solutions to enhance learning and teaching outcomes, while ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar will focus on developing data-driven solutions for agriculture and farmer welfare.
In addition, Google announced a $2 million founding contribution to establish the new Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay.
The hub, set up in memory of Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a pioneer in Indic language technologies and a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind, will aim to ensure that global AI advancements serve India’s linguistic diversity.
“India is approaching artificial intelligence as a strategic national capability, not as a short-term technology trend. The four AI Centres of Excellence have been conceived as a coordinated national research mission, advancing foundational research, responsible AI, and applied solutions that serve public purpose, and contributing to our larger aspiration of Viksit Bharat 2047,” said Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of Education.
“Building a globally competitive AI ecosystem requires not only public investment, but also strong institutional leadership and long-term partnerships with industry. This effort is supported by Google and Google.org through their $8 million contribution to the AI Centres of Excellence and a $2 million founding contribution to the Indic Language Technologies Research Hub at IIT Bombay,” he added.
At Google’s “Lab to Impact” dialogue, supported by the India AI Impact Summit 2026, the company also committed $400,000 to support the development of India’s Health Foundation model using Google’s MedGemma — the specialised AI model designed for healthcare.
As a first step, Ajna Lens will work with experts from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) to build models that will support India-specific use cases in Dermatology and OPD Triaging.
The resulting models will contribute to India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, and their outcomes will be made accessible to the ecosystem.
Google is also working with India’s National Health Authority (NHA) to deploy its advanced AI to convert millions of fragmented, unstructured medical records, such as doctors’ clinical and progress notes, into the international, machine-readable FHIR standard.
“From foundational research to ecosystem deployment to scaled impact, our full-stack approach is equipping the country to lead a global AI-powered future, with innovations from India’s labs benefiting billions across the world,” said Dr Manish Gupta, Senior Research Director, Google DeepMind.
–IANS
rvt/
