IndiaAI Mission unveils homegrown AI foundation models EKA-1 and Dhīr (2B, 5B)

Key facts

• The IndiaAI Mission under the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) released indigenous foundation models EKA-1, developed by Soket Labs Technology and Research, and Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B, developed by ZenteiQ AiTech Innovations.
• The models were unveiled at an event attended by IT Secretary S Krishnan, senior officials from the ministry and IndiaAI, and leadership of both companies.
• Both firms were selected under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre (Foundation Models) pillar, which aims to build indigenous AI capabilities and large language models.
• The government said subsidised access to national AI compute infrastructure and support for ancillary research expenses enabled development of the models.
• EKA-1, built for Indian languages, banking and cybersecurity, has 26.3 billion parameters and was trained on about 7.5 trillion tokens, covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English.
• Soket describes EKA-1 as an open, sparse hybrid language model designed for math, code, reasoning and agentic use, capable of certain on-device inferencing even without mobile data or WiFi.
• Soket CEO Abhishek Upperwal said EKA-1 has been tailored to India's banking, financial services and cybersecurity landscape.
• ZenteiQ's Dhīr 2B and Dhīr 5B are open-source models supporting English and 10 Indian languages, deployable as secure on-premise multilingual assistants.
• The Dhīr models enable offline-capable, document-grounded automation, knowledge retrieval and citizen or enterprise services across defence, government, industrial and educational sectors, especially in low-connectivity or sensitive environments.
• ZenteiQ CEO Prof. Sashikumar said the Dhīr models can run on GPUs, TPUs and mobile phones without cloud connectivity, allowing on-device AI access that improves privacy, security and accessibility.
• IT Secretary S Krishnan said indigenous models strengthen India's technological and strategic autonomy in AI, and platforms like AIKosh can make them accessible to researchers, students, innovators and the public.