New Delhi: The Centre wants artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can summarise Cabinet notes, verify identity through facial checks, and power software agents inside DigiLocker. The tender that sets this out requires government data to stay within India while listing foreign commercial AI services—including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google—among the models those systems may connect to.
The Request for Empanelment (RFE), reopened on 13 August by the National e-Governance Division (NeGD) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in August, a copy of which was reviewed by ThePrint, is a framework for supplying AI and machine learning (ML) staff to ministries, departments, states and public sector undertakings under the Digital India programme.
The document lists reusable AI services that deployed staff may build. One is document summarisation, for which it gives the use cases “Cabinet notes, tender summaries, policy abstracts”. Cabinet notes are the documents circulated to ministers ahead of Union Cabinet decisions.
Another is image matching with liveness detection—a check of whether a face belongs to a live person rather than a photograph—for “attendance, eKYC, digital onboarding” purposes. Here eKYC refers to electronic know-your-customer identity verification.
A third is AI agents for applications such as DigiLocker, the platform that lets citizens store and share official documents. The tender says these agents “must be discoverable and integrable by external developers in the market,” allowing outside developers to embed them in their own applications for “programmatic access to DigiLocker features,” with human checkpoints for actions that cannot be reversed.
The same document sets rules on where data may go. It states that “all data generated or processed under this engagement shall reside within India in Government-approved infrastructure or MeitY-empanelled cloud environments,” and that “transfer of any data outside India is strictly prohibited without NeGD’s written approval.”
In a section on what it calls an “adaptive inference layer”—the part of a system that decides which AI model answers a given request—the RFE says the design should allow switching between two kinds of models. The first is “Commercially Paid Models: Integration with enterprise-grade AI/ML services (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS, Azure).” The second is open-source models such as LLaMA and Mistral, which it says NeGD would run itself to “ensure security, compliance, and adherence to data localization norms.”
The named commercial services are reached over the internet through providers based outside India. The document does not say how requests sent to them would be squared with the rule that data stay in the country. NeGD did not respond to questions on the point at the time of publication.
India does not require all data to be stored locally. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, allows personal data to be sent abroad by default, while giving the government power to bar transfers to specific countries it names. Separately, MeitY’s cloud and e-governance policies, which apply to this tender, require government data to sit on approved infrastructure within India. The DPDP Rules were notified in November 2025, with compliance required by May 2027.
The tender also carries a certification under Rule 144(xi) of the General Financial Rules (GFR), 2017. Bidders must declare that “we are not from a country sharing a land border with India, nor do we have any commercial arrangements that would make us ineligible under Rule 144(xi),” and that neither they nor their subcontractors will source services or goods from firms from, incorporated in, or controlled by such countries, unless registered with the designated authority.
That rule was inserted in July 2020, after the border standoff with China. It requires bidders from countries that share a land border with India — a group that includes China and Pakistan — to register with a committee under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) before they can take part in government procurement. The stated grounds are the country’s defence and national security.
The proposal submission deadline is September 7. The panel will remain valid until 21 April, 2028.
(Edited by Niyati Kothiyal)
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