IndiaAI Mission releases the indigenous foundation models EKA-1 and Dhīr

National Science and technology Science & Technology

IndiaAI Mission releases the indigenous foundation models EKA-1 and Dhīr

3 November 2026

The IndiaAI Mission of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released two home-grown AI foundation models in New Delhi. EKA-1, built by Soket Labs, has 26.3 billion parameters and was trained on about 7.5 trillion tokens. It covers all 22 scheduled Indian languages along with English, and is meant for math, code, reasoning and agentic use. ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations released Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B, open-source assistants for English and 10 Indian languages that can run offline on a device. Both teams were selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre pillar and used subsidised national AI compute. The models can be reached through AIKosh, the mission's datasets platform. MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan attended the release.

EKA-1 developer: Soket Labs EKA-1 parameters: 26.3 billion EKA-1 languages: 22 scheduled Indian languages and English Dhīr models: Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B by ZenteiQ

Why it matters for exams: The IndiaAI Mission, its pillars and its platform AIKosh are recurring science-and-technology questions; the 22 scheduled languages tie to the Eighth Schedule.

Kerala PSCUPSCSSC

3 November 2026 Source: Press Information Bureau

In plain words

Foundation model — A large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted to many tasks.

AIKosh IndiaAI Datasets Platform — The IndiaAI Mission's platform for datasets and AI models.

MeitY Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology — The Union ministry under which the IndiaAI Mission runs.