India stands at a pivotal moment in its AI journey, and industry voices are clear: to truly harness artificial intelligence for public good, the country must build its own models, not merely consume what's imported. According to leaders from the IndiaAI Mission, relying exclusively on foreign-built foundation models can leave India as that “large user” generating data for others while ceding strategic advantage.

Developing indigenous models means training on datasets rooted in Indian languages, cultural contexts and social realities—so AI can serve citizens meaningfully in education, healthcare, governance and rural inclusion. Under the mission, the government ensures autonomy over models developed with its support, committing them for public-use, open access and dual-purpose deployment.

However, the task is not trivial. India faces challenges such as building large-scale compute infrastructure, curating multilingual data, investing in research and defining a path between cost/risk and innovation. Despite this, the consensus is that for AI to genuinely uplift society—to make services smarter, inclusive and sovereign—India must stop being just a consumer and become a creator.