The Indian government backend technology arm is seeing a rush of requests from departments and agencies to create AI-based software, and integrating AI functionalities into existing public facing digital systems, officials at The National Informatics Centre (NIC) told ET.
From a search analytics tool made for judges to instantly flip through all Supreme Court rulings from 1950 onwards, to AI tools that scour district databases to effectively find eligible beneficiaries of direct benefit transfer schemes, the ministry of electronics and information technology’s tech partner has created a suite of tailored AI based tools for central and state entities, they said.
“The judiciary is becoming a major user of AI. Judges have 60 cases to dispose of in a day. Instead of going through an average of 300-400 pages of court documents and wait for clerical staff to give them the data, they can upload a petition to our tool and get a template-based summary providing the brief of the petition, the antecedents of the cases and other insights,” said a NIC official. The top court is also using AI Panini, a text translation service covering all 22 official Indic languages developed by NIC to translate legal corpus from English to Hindi, he added. The tool has been trained on data open sourced from the national language translation mission, a Central initiative to make knowledge texts accessible in all 22 official languages. Panini is one among a suite of AI tools for text developed by the NIC that have seen major demand in 2025, they added.
“We are seeing a lot of requests for AI Saransh, a text summarisation service in English and AI Shruti, a streaming text transcription service, from government departments,” one official added. The Centre’s push to wean officials away from the usage of publicly available AI-based tools owned by foreign entities has also contributed to the demand. “NIC had established a centre of excellence in artificial intelligence nearly seven years back in January 2019. But a cross section of the central and state government workforce is only now beginning to understand the geopolitical risks emanating from using foreign AI tools. As a result, our AI resource division is now providing all our tools as part of an ‘AI as a service package’ to keen government users,” another official said.
Varied uses
Among states, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka have led the charge in tasking NIC with multiple requests to design and deploy AI-based tools for government work. “The government had received positive feedback after rolling out the Kumbh Sah’AI’yak chatbot, conversant in 11 languages that provided real-time assistance to millions of pilgrims at the Mahakumbh in January this year. Since then, NIC’s state centre in Uttar Pradesh has used AI to sift through the state’s district databases for updating the list of government beneficiaries and made it easier for citizens to access land records through the Board of Revenue portals,” he said.
Recently, the ministry of Panchayati Raj wrote to state governments to make use of its GIS based application called Gram Manchitra which uses an AI-driven geospatial image analytics service developed by NIC, a ministry official said. “NIC’s in-house AI can process drone images to identify development indicators such as concrete roof tops, assess the potential for solar panelling, and monitor and prevent natural disasters like floods at local levels.
Face verification and identification services provided by the NIC’s AI Satyapikaanan tool are also among other products seeing the most interest, another official said. Case in point, regional transport offices are using it to automate the process of renewing driver’s licenses, while the Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS), a national platform for information sharing among courts, police, jails and forensic science laboratories is using it for suspect identification, he added.
From a search analytics tool made for judges to instantly flip through all Supreme Court rulings from 1950 onwards, to AI tools that scour district databases to effectively find eligible beneficiaries of direct benefit transfer schemes, the ministry of electronics and information technology’s tech partner has created a suite of tailored AI based tools for central and state entities, they said.
“The judiciary is becoming a major user of AI. Judges have 60 cases to dispose of in a day. Instead of going through an average of 300-400 pages of court documents and wait for clerical staff to give them the data, they can upload a petition to our tool and get a template-based summary providing the brief of the petition, the antecedents of the cases and other insights,” said a NIC official. The top court is also using AI Panini, a text translation service covering all 22 official Indic languages developed by NIC to translate legal corpus from English to Hindi, he added. The tool has been trained on data open sourced from the national language translation mission, a Central initiative to make knowledge texts accessible in all 22 official languages. Panini is one among a suite of AI tools for text developed by the NIC that have seen major demand in 2025, they added.
“We are seeing a lot of requests for AI Saransh, a text summarisation service in English and AI Shruti, a streaming text transcription service, from government departments,” one official added. The Centre’s push to wean officials away from the usage of publicly available AI-based tools owned by foreign entities has also contributed to the demand. “NIC had established a centre of excellence in artificial intelligence nearly seven years back in January 2019. But a cross section of the central and state government workforce is only now beginning to understand the geopolitical risks emanating from using foreign AI tools. As a result, our AI resource division is now providing all our tools as part of an ‘AI as a service package’ to keen government users,” another official said.
Varied uses
Among states, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka have led the charge in tasking NIC with multiple requests to design and deploy AI-based tools for government work. “The government had received positive feedback after rolling out the Kumbh Sah’AI’yak chatbot, conversant in 11 languages that provided real-time assistance to millions of pilgrims at the Mahakumbh in January this year. Since then, NIC’s state centre in Uttar Pradesh has used AI to sift through the state’s district databases for updating the list of government beneficiaries and made it easier for citizens to access land records through the Board of Revenue portals,” he said.
Recently, the ministry of Panchayati Raj wrote to state governments to make use of its GIS based application called Gram Manchitra which uses an AI-driven geospatial image analytics service developed by NIC, a ministry official said. “NIC’s in-house AI can process drone images to identify development indicators such as concrete roof tops, assess the potential for solar panelling, and monitor and prevent natural disasters like floods at local levels.
Face verification and identification services provided by the NIC’s AI Satyapikaanan tool are also among other products seeing the most interest, another official said. Case in point, regional transport offices are using it to automate the process of renewing driver’s licenses, while the Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS), a national platform for information sharing among courts, police, jails and forensic science laboratories is using it for suspect identification, he added.