IndiaAI Mission Releases Indigenous Foundation AI Models
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), through its IndiaAI Mission, has officially released indigenous foundation models EKA-1 developed by Soket Labs Technology and Research Private Limited, and Dhīr 2B & Dhīr 5B developed by ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations. The release occurred on November 3, 2026, at a press event in New Delhi attended by Shri S. Krishnan, Secretary of MeitY, senior officials from MeitY and IndiaAI, and leadership teams from both developing companies.
These models represent a key milestone under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) pillar of the IndiaAI Mission, which was approved by the Union Cabinet on March 7, 2024, with the vision of "Making AI in India and Making AI Work for India." The development was enabled by access to subsidized national AI compute infrastructure and support for ancillary research expenses under the mission.
Model Specifications and Capabilities
Soket's EKA-1 is a powerful foundation model featuring 26.3 billion parameters trained on approximately 7.5 trillion tokens. It is designed as an open, sparse hybrid language model with advanced capabilities spanning all 22 scheduled Indian languages alongside English, specifically optimized for math, code, reasoning, and agentic use. According to Abhishek Upperwal, CEO of Soket, the model is specifically tailored to India's unique banking, financial services, and cybersecurity landscape.
ZenteiQ's offerings include the open-source Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B models, which function as multilingual assistants supporting English and 10 Indian languages. These models are designed for secure, on-premise deployment with offline capabilities, enabling document-grounded automation, knowledge retrieval, and citizen or enterprise services across defence, government, industrial, and educational sectors, particularly in low-connectivity or sensitive environments. Prof. Sashikumar, CEO of ZenteiQ, emphasized that their lightweight architecture enables on-device deployment on mobile phones without cloud connectivity dependency.
Strategic Significance and Accessibility
Shri S. Krishnan highlighted that the development of such indigenous models strengthens India's technological and strategic autonomy in Artificial Intelligence while creating opportunities to improve productivity and efficiency across government, industry, research, and education. The models will be made accessible through platforms such as AIKosh (IndiaAI Datasets Platform) to researchers, students, innovators, and the wider public to encourage further experimentation and innovation.
The IndiaAI Mission operates across seven key pillars to establish a robust AI ecosystem: IndiaAI Compute Capacity, IndiaAI Innovation Centre, IndiaAI Datasets Platform (AIKosh), IndiaAI Application Development Initiative, IndiaAI FutureSkills, IndiaAI Startup Financing, and Safe & Trusted AI. This initiative aims to address India-centric challenges, create economic and employment opportunities, and position India as a global leader in artificial intelligence.