New Delhi: Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday launched the Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for education, named Bodhan AI, at the two-day Bharat Bodhan AI Conclave 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi.
Bodhan AI, set up at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, will create the Bharat EduAI Stack — an open digital public infrastructure (DPI) designed to power AI tools across school education, higher education, skilling, and research. The DPI will be built on Indian AI models to ensure data sovereignty.
Explaining the functioning of Bodhan AI, IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti said the CoE will develop a foundational multilingual AI model hosted in India, along with a common technology layer that states, institutions, and edtech startups can use to build learning tools. “The platform will be designed to act as both a basic infrastructure provider in the form of DPI and an application aggregator, allowing existing edtech solutions and new startups to plug into a shared ecosystem rather than creating parallel systems,” he said.
The CoE in AI for education will be run through a Section-8 company, the IIT Madras Bodhan AI Foundation. A Section 8 company in India is a non-profit organisation (NPO) registered under the Companies Act, 2013, designed to promote charitable objectives.
“Initial funding will come from government support for up to five years. Sustainability is expected to come from state partnerships, CSR contributions, and equity participation in incubated startups that build solutions on the platform,” Kamakoti said.
The Union Budget 2025-26 had allocated ₹500 crore to establish a CoE in AI for education. An amount of ₹100 crore has been allocated for the financial year 2026-27.
Kamakoti said the Bharat EduAI Stack will create a DPI on which AI-powered solutions can be built to analyse student responses for personalised learning feedback, provide teachers with classroom insights, offer early signals on learning gaps for parents, and deliver real-time analytics to administrators and policymakers.
The Indian-made DPI will also support edtech startups and institutions in developing solutions for mentoring, career guidance, research assistance, and lifelong skilling beyond schools. Solutions developed through the DPI of Bodhan AI will focus on structured learning rather than entertainment-driven interfaces to minimise risks such as digital overuse, he said.
“Student data protection and privacy safeguards will be built into the design, with strict controls on storage and access,” he added.
Kamakoti said the government has set tight timelines for deployment of AI-powered education solutions in educational institutions. “Over the next six months to one year, the CoE plans to pilot AI tools in at least two to three states, initially covering about 10–25% of schools in selected regions to measure learning outcomes and system-level impact. We have identified over 100 edtech startups which showcased their work at exhibitions during the conclave. We will onboard them, improve their applicability, and then deploy them in institutions.”
Speaking at the launch, Pradhan said the initiative would help integrate AI into education at scale while promoting ethical, inclusive, and responsible AI. He emphasised the need for interoperable and sovereign AI systems aligned with India’s linguistic diversity and development goals.
Several institutional partnerships and AI programmes were also announced during the conclave. The second day of the event on Friday will focus on digital public infrastructure, AI platforms, emerging technologies, skilling, and higher education.
