New Delhi: Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan launched the Center of Excellence (CoE) on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Education, named Bodhan AI, at the two-day Bharat Bodhan AI Conclave 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on Thursday.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday launched the Center of Excellence (CoE) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Education (@dpradhanbjp X)Bodhan AI, founded at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India will build the EduAI stack — an open digital public infrastructure (DPI) designed to power AI tools across school education, higher education, skills and research. DPI will be built on the Indian AI model to ensure data sovereignty.
Explaining the functionality of Bodhan AI, IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti said the CoE will develop a basic 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 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 building parallel systems,” he said.
The CoE on 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 organization (NPO) registered under the Companies Act, 2013, designed to promote charitable objectives.
“The 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 develop solutions on the platform,” Kamakoti said.
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The Union Budget 2025-26 allocation was ₹500 crore to establish a CoE on AI for Education. an amount ₹100 crore has been allocated for the financial year 2026-27.
Kamakoti said the Bharat EduAI stack will build a DPI on which AI-powered solutions can be built to analyze student feedback for personalized learning, provide classroom insights to teachers, provide early signals of learning gaps for parents and provide real-time analytics to administrators and policymakers.
The Indian-made DPI will help edtech startups and institutions develop solutions for mentoring, career guidance, research support and lifelong skills beyond schools. Solutions developed through Bodhan AI’s DPI will focus on structured learning rather than entertainment-driven interfaces to reduce risks such as digital overuse, he said.
“Student data protection and privacy safeguards will be built into the design, with strict controls over storage and access,” he added.
Kamakoti said the government has set a tight deadline for deploying AI-powered education solutions in educational institutions. “Over the next six months to a year, the CoE plans to pilot the 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 more than 100 edtech startups that showcased their work in exhibits during the conference. We will then expand to their institutions.”
Speaking at the launch, Pradhan said the initiative will help promote ethical, inclusive and responsible AI as well as integrate AI with education. He emphasized the need for interoperable and sovereign AI systems compatible with India’s linguistic diversity and development goals.
Several institutional partnerships and AI programs were also announced during the conclave. The second day of the event on Friday will focus on digital public infrastructure, AI platforms, emerging technologies, skills and higher education.
