Maharashtra approves Rs 11.26 crore sovereign AI package for state government departments

The Maharashtra government has granted approval for the deployment of sovereign artificial intelligence solutions from Sarvam AI for government departments with a twoyear outlay of Rs 1126 croreThe package covers the deployment of Indus a sovereign AI workspace for around 2500 state government users at an indicative firstyear cost of Rs 563 crore and a twoyear outlay of Rs 1126 crore said a Government Resolution GRThe proposal was cleared by a HighPower Committee headed by the chief secretaryAccording to the GR Sarvam AI has proposed sovereign AI solutions hosted entirely on secure and audited infrastructure within India ensuring that no government data leaves the countryBesides Indus the package included Samvaad voice and WhatsAppbased citizen outreach agents and Saaras and Bulbul speech models for integration into the states MahaAI platformThe Indus platform will provide drafting and file noting assistance RTI response generation document intelligence optical character recognition OCR across Indian scripts multilingual interaction in 22 languages including Marathi project workspaces data analysis and integration with eOffice and NIC email wherever API access is availableThe commercial structure includes a Foundation Partner subscription rate of Rs 1200 per user per month for the first 12 months compared with the standard rate of Rs 2500 per user per monthIt also includes a onetime professional services fee of Rs 50 lakh setup and adoption manpower costing Rs 42 lakh for three months and an annual platform maintenance fee of Rs 25 lakhThe committee also approved Track Two department transformation engagements starting at Rs 50 lakh per engagement and ondemand ForwardDeployed Engineers FDEs at Rs 7 lakh per engineer per monthIt additionally cleared the deployment of two FDEs beyond the initial threemonth period until December at the same rate excluding taxesThe GR further approved a onemonth pilot of the Samvaad AI agent for tuberculosis awarenessThe software will make outreach calls to TB patients in local languages and analyse call qualityThe pilot carries a onetime agent development charge of Rs 6 lakh and a usage charge of Rs 3 per minuteIt also approved the integration of Saaras a speech recognition model and Bulbul a texttospeech model into the MahaAI platform for four months on a usagebased nocommitment basisThe department will pay API usage charges of Rs 050 per minute for Saaras and Rs 30 per 10000 characters for Bulbul excluding GSTThe Electronics Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence Department will bear the expenditure while the Commissionerate of Electronics Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence has been authorised to implement the project in accordance with the prescribed terms and conditions the GR saidThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever