New Delhi: The government is willing to spend big bucks to rope in Artificial Intelligence talent. Salaries can go up to Rs 4.58 lakh a month—about Rs 55 lakh a year—for the seniormost AI roles it hires through a panel of supplier agencies. And they must take the rate as it stands.
That figure sits above the government’s own top pay scales. A Secretary to the Government of India, among the senior-most civil servants, draws a basic pay of Rs 2.25 lakh a month under the Apex Scale of the 7th Pay Commission; the Cabinet Secretary, the country’s senior-most civil servant, draws Rs 2.50 lakh.
The comparison is not like-for-like—the panel figure is what the government pays a supplier firm for each specialist, covering the firm’s overheads and margin as well as the individual’s own pay—but it marks how far the state is prepared to go for these new-age skills.
The figures appear in a Request for Empanelment (RFE) reopened this month by the National e-Governance Division (NeGD), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), a copy of which ThePrint has seen. The tender bars negotiation.
It is, perhaps, the first public benchmark of what the government will pay to compete for skills that command a premium in the private market.
The rates were set in an earlier round. The government floated the first tender in November 2025, and it drew close to 80 bidders. After technical and financial evaluation, six firms—Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), NEC Corporation India, Kyndryl Solutions, Cactus Technology Solutions, CoRover and Innefu Labs— were empanelled and issued letters of empanelment in April 2026.
The first tender only had a blank rate-card form, leaving bidders to fill in their rates. The figures now public came from that process—the firm with the lowest total bid for all 12 roles set the benchmark that other eligible bidders had to match.
The panel it creates will run valid until April 2028, with an option for the government to extend it by a year. The framework lets ministries, states and PSUs hire from the panel directly, without floating a fresh tender for each requirement. The reopening adds more firms to the same panel, so new entrants have to follow the rates fixed in the first round.
The rate card sets the monthly fee for an AI/Solution Architect, Data Science Lead and AI/ML Lead at Rs 4,58,500 each. A Programme or Product Manager gets Rs 4,12,500, a Data Engineering Lead Rs 3,66,666, while an AI/ML Engineer, a Data Scientist and an MLOps Lead Rs 3,20,834 each. At the lower end, a Business Analyst will draw Rs 2,16,666 a month, or about Rs 26 lakh a year. All figures exclude Goods and Services Tax (GST).
Specialised or “niche” roles, according to the tender, will be billed at 1.5 times the AI/ML Engineer rate, or nearly Rs 4.81 lakh a month. It allows rates to be revised by up to 10 percent each year. However, the tender does not allow any increase or negotiation of the L1 rates—the lowest rates found in the bidding process. For new firms, this means accepting the rates set by the first successful bidder or staying out of the panel.
The proposal deadline is 7 September, with technical bids to open the next day. Only firms scoring 75 out of 100 or more proceed to the final stage.
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What the hires will do
The experts brought in at these rates are not there only to advise. The tender sets out, in detail, what they are to build—and a large part of it is the government’s own machinery to run AI.
NeGD says it “will establish an in-house, multi-tenant inference server” on state-owned computers, naming the National Informatics Centre’s MeghRaj cloud, so that AI programmes can run on government infrastructure, rather than lean entirely on outside services.
The staff are to load and run freely available models on this system and open them up “behind stable APIs that any NeGD/DIC project can call”. Application programming interfaces are a set of rules or protocols enabling software applications to communicate with each other to exchange data, features and functionality.
The rest is a catalogue of tools for everyday government work. One is software that shortens long official files into quick summaries; the tender gives the examples as “Cabinet notes, tender summaries, policy abstracts”. Another is chatbots for apps such as UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance) and DigiLocker, answering questions “in various regional languages alongside English”.
A third lets citizens and field workers fill government forms by speaking instead of typing, and move through official websites by voice, in Indian languages.
The hires will build systems that read and pull data from “certificates, IDs, forms, and scanned PDFs,” as well as develop face-verification tools for “attendance, eKYC, digital onboarding”. The tender also asks for software assistants that can carry out tasks inside DigiLocker on a user’s behalf, such as fetching and checking a document, while requiring human approval for any action that cannot be undone.
A wider door, a fixed price
While fixing the price, the reopened round throws the door open wider. The average annual turnover a bidder must show is halved from Rs 50 crore to Rs 25 crore. The minimum staff strength, too, is down from 200 full-time employees to 100. The minimum value of a qualifying past project is cut from Rs 3 crore to Rs 1 crore. A requirement from the first round that bidders have a positive net worth for three consecutive years has now been removed.
Startups gain the most. The tender states that “MSMEs and Startups are exempted from” both the turnover and the staff criteria. In the first round, such firms were only “considered for exemption at NeGD’s discretion”. The relaxation is open to firms recognised by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), or the National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC). Against these eased terms, the government has raised one bar: the technical score a bidder must reach to advance has gone up from 70 to 75 out of 100.
An empanelled agency can be hired by any ministry, department or PSU either through NeGD or, the tender says, “independently at the same discovered rates, without reporting to NeGD”.
Payments are split into two parts: 60 percent is paid each month for the manpower, while 40 percent is cleared each quarter based on the work delivered. Agencies that fill a position within 15 days get a one-time bonus of 5 percent of the first month’s bill.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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