IndiaAI Mission Releases EKA-1 and Dhir Foundation Models

The IndiaAI Mission of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) placed three home-grown foundation models in the public domain at a press event in New Delhi. The models are EKA-1, built by Soket Labs Technology and Research Private Limited, and the pair Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B, built by ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations. MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan unveiled them in the company of senior officers of the ministry and of IndiaAI, together with the leadership teams of the two firms.

What EKA-1 brings

• EKA-1 carries 26.3 billion parameters and was trained on roughly 7.5 trillion tokens.
• It spans all 22 scheduled Indian languages besides English.
• It is an open, sparse hybrid language model shaped for mathematics, code, reasoning and agentic tasks.
• Soket chief executive Abhishek Upperwal said the model was tuned to the banking, financial services and cybersecurity landscape of the country.

What Dhir brings

The Dhir 2B and Dhir 5B models from ZenteiQ are open-source assistants meant to sit inside an organisation on its own servers. They work in English and 10 Indian languages, keep working without a network link, and handle document-grounded automation, knowledge retrieval and citizen or enterprise services for defence, government, industrial and education users. That makes them useful where connectivity is thin or the data is sensitive. ZenteiQ chief Prof. Sashikumar said the light architecture lets the models run on GPUs and TPUs and even on mobile handsets, so the data need never leave the device.

How the mission backed them

Both developers were chosen under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) pillar of the mission and were given subsidised national AI compute along with help for allied research costs. Mr Krishnan said such models add to the technological and strategic autonomy of the country and can be shared through the AIKosh platform with students, researchers and innovators. IndiaAI Chief Operating Officer Sudeep Shrivastava said the two releases show progress at both ends of the scale, from light models for everyday devices to heavier ones for complex enterprise work. The Union Cabinet cleared the IndiaAI Mission on 7 March 2024 under the motto of making AI in India and making AI work for India, and it runs through seven pillars: compute capacity, the Innovation Centre, the AIKosh datasets platform, application development, FutureSkills, startup financing, and Safe and Trusted AI.