MediaNama reported on 17 October that NASSCOM, India's software industry body, wants the government to review how it buys AI. It wants Indian foundation models, the large base models other AI tools build on, to get preference over those from Google and Meta. The request is in a Parliament committee report tabled in September 2026. NASSCOM said Sarvam AI and BharatGen, both government-backed model builders, still face L1 tenders. It said China gave its own firms real preference.
MediaNama said the committee acknowledged the bottleneck NASSCOM raised but did not explicitly recommend changing the procurement rules or the L1 process. Its broader remarks, as quoted by MediaNama, speak of follow-through and adoption pathways in general terms, without naming procurement. The sources do not say how much preference NASSCOM wants, or whether the government will act.
An L1 tender ranks bids by price and gives the contract to the lowest one. This is general background, not from MediaNama. It is our reasoning that price-only ranking treats models as interchangeable, so a funded Indian builder is judged against firms NASSCOM says spent hundreds of billions of dollars. Buyers and vendors can ask what a tender's evaluation criteria are, and whether model suppliers are scored on anything besides price.