The Minister of Railways, Electronics and Information Technology, and Information and Broadcasting announced that the government will provide free artificial intelligence (AI) training to nearly 0.55 million village-level entrepreneurs (VLEs) to empower rural India in the digital era. VLEs operate common services centres (CSCs), which deliver essential public services and are present in about 90 per cent of the country’s villages.
The move is part of a broader push to decentralise AI capabilities and foster local innovation. Earlier in May, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) revealed that India’s national AI compute infrastructure now exceeds 34,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), a milestone meant to support training and inference for indigenous foundational AI models.
To further streamline service delivery, the minister said he would personally engage with state chief ministers to integrate state-run digital service centres with the CSC network. The goal is to unify service channels and enhance the income potential of VLEs by consolidating their operations under one digital roof.
The CSC special purpose vehicle (SPV), set up in 2006 under MeitY, oversees a nationwide network that brings digital services to the last mile. Each CSC is operated by a VLE, typically a local resident, who earns by delivering government-to-citizen (G2C) services. Currently, there are CSCs in nearly 0.25 million gram panchayats, covering more than 0.55 million villages.
