Govt to release consultation paper on AI regulations in 30 days: Vaishnaw

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw says the proposed AI framework will focus on safety, security, skilling and a human-first approach, with industry playing a key role in regulation

The government will release a draft consultation paper on regulations for artificial intelligence (AI) in the country within the next 30 days, Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday. 

The draft regulations will encompass key aspects such as safety and security in AI, push for a human-first approach, focus on skilling and reskilling, be inclusive on all counts and ensure that the harms are restricted, Vaishnaw said during his address on the launch of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2026 on the Promise of Artificial Intelligence. 

“That consultation paper will form the basis for the regulations on AI. We have always maintained that AI cannot be regulated by just having a law. We have to take a techno-legal approach and bring such solutions. A bulk of these regulations will have to be undertaken by the industry,” Vaishnaw said. 

 

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology constituted the Artificial Intelligence Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG), an inter-ministerial body tasked with coordinating AI policy across key ministries, their respective departments, and sectoral regulators. 

India currently lacks a unified law on AI, and most governance of AI-led tools and services falls under the Information Te­chnology Act of 2000 or the Information Technology Rules of 2022. 

To ensure that government departments use AI safely and within defined parameters, the government will empanel a certain number of startups and companies. Only these companies will be permitted to bid for AI projects for government departments at the central and state levels, he said. 

In addition, to ensure adequate use of the graphics processing units (GPUs), the government will guarantee usage for up to five years in phases, so bidders are assured of the commercial value of the GPUs they onboard, he said. 

The government has also floated a request for proposals to onboard another 10,000 GPUs. Of these, the government will onboard 3,000 directly for its own use, while the other 7,000 will be open to bidding by different companies, the Union minister said. 

“In parallel, we are looking at other options, in the sense of how we can come up with solutions that are home-grown solutions for GPUs, at least for the inference bit in AI. That road map looks visible to us now,” Vaishnaw said. 

Earlier this year, the government had floated a tender to onboard up to 15,000 B100, B200 Nvidia and other latest technology GPUs. 

So far, more than 38,000 GPUs have been onboarded under the IndiaAI Mission across three rounds of bidding, after which the government allowed companies to onboard GPUs continuously, provided they procure and supply them at the average L1 price of nearly ₹115 per GPU hour. 

With nearly 15,000 GPUs onboarded in January and a bid for another 10,000 now being opened, the total number of GPUs in the country is likely to exceed 50,000, according to government estimates. 

Companies will procure and supply all these GPUs as part of the ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission, approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2024. 

After the first round of GPU bidding, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology opened a continuous empanelment process for companies wishing to bid to procure and supply these high-end computing processors. The ministry now empanels new bidders every quarter. 

In the first round, the government empanelled 10 companies to procure and supply 18,693 GPUs, including 12,896 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 1,480 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and MI325 and MI300X GPUs. 

Reliance Industries-owned Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, and the Hiranandani Group-owned Yotta Data Services are among the key players that passed the muster to procure and supply GPUs to startups, academics, researchers and other users in the country in the first round. 

Other firms such as CMS Computers India, Ctrls Datacentres, E2E Networks, and Locuz Enterprise Solutions have also been shortlisted by the IT ministry in the first round.