Category: Technology News
India has launched three indigenous AI foundation models under the IndiaAI Mission — EKA-1, Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B. They were unveiled in New Delhi on 3 November 2026 by S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
The models were developed under the Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) pillar of the IndiaAI Mission, which the Union Cabinet approved on 7 March 2024. Both developers — Soket Labs Technology and Research, and ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations — were selected under that pillar, with subsidised national AI computing infrastructure and research support.
EKA-1: the large model
EKA-1, built by Soket Labs, is a foundation model with 26.3 billion parameters, trained on approximately 7.5 trillion tokens. It supports all 22 scheduled Indian languages alongside English, and is aimed at banking, financial services, cybersecurity, complex reasoning and enterprise work.
Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B: the offline models
ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations, a startup born at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, built Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B as open-source foundation models. Dhīr 2B is a dense model with 2.03 billion parameters; Dhīr 5B uses a mixture-of-experts design with 5.09 billion total parameters, of which 1.79 billion are active at a time.
Both Dhīr models support English and 10 Indian languages, and are designed to run fully offline on laptops and edge devices and to be deployed on an organisation’s own infrastructure — for secure, multilingual work in defence, government, industry and education, including in low-connectivity or sensitive environments. A larger Dhīr 9B model is in development.
What is not claimed
No independent benchmark results or deployment figures were given at the launch, and the announcement does not establish that EKA-1 has already been adopted by banks or deployed in operational cyber-defence systems. The models should not be described as outperforming named rivals, and Dhīr should not be called “India’s first” anything.
Earlier foundation models under the IndiaAI Mission include Sarvam AI, BharatGen and Gnani AI.
Sources: IndiaAI Mission / MeitY announcement, 3 November 2026; The Hindu BusinessLine, 4 November 2026; PIB.
