MeitY Picks CoRover to Build a Shared Agentic AI Platform for Government, Starting With DigiLocker
MeitY's National e-Governance Division has selected Bengaluru's CoRover.ai to build a reusable agentic AI platform for government departments, with DigiLocker as the first deployment.
India's government has picked a domestic start-up to build the plumbing for AI assistants across its digital services. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), through its National e-Governance Division (NeGD), has selected Bengaluru-based CoRover.ai to develop a unified, reusable agentic AI platform, with DigiLocker — the government's document wallet — as its first deployment, according to reports published this week.
The selection
NeGD chose CoRover through a quality-and-cost-based selection (QCBS) process, BW Businessworld, Storyboard18, NewsBytes and The420 reported. According to an evaluation document dated 24 September cited by Storyboard18 and NewsBytes, CoRover received a final score of 100, while Kyndryl Solutions scored 91.24. They were the only two bidders to clear the technical round; Cactus Technology Solutions and NEC Corporation India were disqualified.
The contract value has been reported at about ₹3.63 crore (Adgully) and roughly ₹4 crore (Whalesbook). No official MeitY or NeGD statement on the award had been published at the time of writing, so the details rest on media reports citing the evaluation document.
What the platform is meant to do
The idea is to stop each ministry from building its own chatbot from scratch. The planned platform will give departments standard tools to create, deploy and manage AI agents tailored to their needs, reducing duplicated technical effort across government, according to BW Businessworld and NewsBytes.
The assistants are designed around an "ask, do and escalate" model: answer a citizen's question, carry out a task where possible, and hand the case to a human when needed. The platform is also expected to include safeguards against prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks — attempts to manipulate an AI model into ignoring its instructions — which is a significant concern for any system that can take actions on government records.
DigiLocker will be the first implementation. The work is split into a four-month development phase followed by 12 months of operations and maintenance support, The420 reported.
Why DigiLocker first
DigiLocker is one of India's most widely used digital public infrastructure services, letting citizens store and share verified copies of documents such as driving licences, marksheets and identity records issued directly by government agencies. It is a natural testbed: the questions users ask are frequent and repetitive, the underlying documents are structured, and the service already sits at the centre of many other government workflows. An assistant that can help a user find, fetch or share a document — in their own language — could reduce the friction that still keeps many citizens from using the service fully.
Who is CoRover
CoRover is best known for conversational AI deployments in the public sector, including virtual assistants for Indian Railways' ticketing platform. It has also promoted BharatGPT, a set of Indic-language models it has developed. Winning a platform contract from NeGD, as opposed to a single chatbot deployment, would put the company at the heart of how AI agents are delivered across government services.
What to watch
The contract is small in rupee terms, but its significance is architectural. If the platform works for DigiLocker, NeGD could extend it to other services it manages, creating a shared layer on which many departments build their assistants. That raises important questions about data protection, auditability of automated actions, language coverage and how escalation to human officials works in practice. It also makes the security safeguards central rather than optional: an AI agent with access to citizens' official documents is a high-value target.
For India's AI ecosystem, the selection is another example of the government choosing a domestic company for sovereign AI infrastructure — a trend that, if it continues, could give Indian start-ups the scale of real-world deployment that is hard to get anywhere else.
Sources
- BW Businessworld: https://www.businessworld.in/article/corover-wins-meity-contract-for-unified-ai-platform-627704
- Storyboard18: https://www.storyboard18.com/digital/corover-wins-meity-contract-to-build-unified-ai-assistant-ws-l-112138.htm
- NewsBytes: https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/science/meity-chooses-corover-for-government-s-unified-ai-platform/story
- The420.in: https://the420.in/corover-government-agentic-ai-platform-digilocker/
- Adgully: https://www.adgully.com/post/21863/corover-wins-meity-contract-to-build-sovereign-agentic-ai-platform-starting-with-digilocker
- Whalesbook: https://www.whalesbook.com/news/English/technology/CoRover-Wins-indian-rupee4-Crore-MeitY-Contract-for-Sovereign-AI-Platform/6ac7a77479a16deaeaeaf1fa