Google Announces New AI Initiatives Across India

Google announced new initiatives across crop science, education, agriculture, and economic inclusion in India.

Google DeepMind and Google.org are collaborating with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington to build an open-access genetic atlas for sorghum. The initiative draws on a representative sample from ICRISAT’s genebank of over 44,000 distinct seeds from over 90 countries. Google DeepMind will also support a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at ICRISAT.

In agriculture, Google is making its Agricultural Understanding models available in public preview. Amnex has integrated the APIs into the Government of Gujarat’s Krushi Pragati platform, supporting over 900 million SMS-based advisories for over 600,000 farmers across over 14 million hectares. OpenAgriNet has also incorporated the APIs into an analytics dashboard.

Google is expanding its Google AI Educator Series through partnerships with Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, and the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, following training for over 80,000 educators since May. A free, online self-paced training program is launching in English, with Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Odia, and Punjabi versions coming later this month. Educators are also being supported across 100 Atal Tinkering Labs using ATL Saathi, a Gemini-powered desktop application.

To support economic inclusion, Google.org is providing $15 million in funding to The/Nudge to accelerate the growth of India's micro, small, and medium enterprises, which include more than 90 million MSMEs employing over 345 million people.