In a move set to reshape access to AI-enabled devices in India, Priyank Kharge, Karnataka’s minister for electronics, IT, BT, and rural development & panchayat raj, announced the state’s plan to prioritise affordable AI machines for students and early-stage founders.
The government will work within procurement rules to launch credible pilots, Kharge said during the Startup Vision event at Cypher2025, India’s biggest AI summit. You’ll see what Karnataka has pushed for to ensure AI computers for all. Just wait until 18 November when we launch at the Bengaluru tech summit,” he added.
The initiative aims to democratise AI by providing students, researchers, and startups with affordable access to AI devices.
Startups like Revrag, Skylark Drones, SatSure, and Soket AI participated in the event, pitching innovative ideas, including developing multilingual LLMs and drones for governance, and AI agents for streamlining BFSI onboarding. They expressed interest in collaborating with the government.
The conversation also touched on the challenges of compute infrastructure. A founder highlighted that on-device models running on consumer-grade hardware could reduce costs and latency for Indian use cases, but teams need a baseline kit to experiment.
“Technology isn’t the problem, but infrastructure is,” said one founder. They pointed out the GPU shortage, the friction in government procurement, and Bengaluru’s overstretched roads and metros as significant bottlenecks.
Startup Meets Government Realism
Founders advocated for a simpler path to proofs of concept, noting that many have developed agents for citizen services, triage tools for hospitals, and safety monitoring systems for factories. However, they lamented the bureaucratic hurdles that delay pilot projects.
Kharge acknowledged these constraints, explaining that the state must comply with transparency and procurement laws. “Any solution must prove three things—technical merit, price discipline, and scalability across thousands of gram panchayats,” he said.
However, Kharge left the door open for time-bound trials. “The government of Karnataka is happy to be your first customer, either through a pilot or procurement,” he stated, emphasising that pilot projects and public-procurement carve-outs could be used for well-defined and measurable innovations.
A Strategic Push for R&D
Kharge also highlighted Karnataka’s focus on structured research initiatives, including a possible extension of the Nipuna scheme to fund and retain advanced research talent. “This will position Bengaluru not just as a services hub but as a global centre for frontier AI R&D,” he noted.
When asked about data-sharing initiatives, Kharge acknowledged Karnataka’s collaboration with mobility agencies and city utilities to release operational data for unified commuter apps. However, he cautioned that some datasets would remain closed or tightly controlled. He encouraged startups to propose specific datasets like district-level crop-loss histories or claims gaps for evaluation.
Addressing Bengaluru’s Infrastructure Bottleneck
When Himanshu Upreti, cofounder & CTO at AI Palette, raised concerns about Bengaluru’s traffic, Kharge pointed to the central–state funding imbalance. “For every ₹100 Karnataka gives the Centre, we get back only ₹12,” he said. “Give me ₹25 or ₹50, and I’ll build better roads and create more jobs.”
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