Bengaluru-based BharatGPT maker has been picked by the National e-Governance Division to create a reusable agentic AI framework for government services, starting with DigiLocker, in a contract worth about Rs 3.63 crore.
Bengaluru-based CoRover, the company behind BharatGPT, has been awarded a government contract to develop a unified AI assistant and bot platform for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). DigiLocker will be the first government service to run on the new agentic AI framework, according to media reports.
The National e-Governance Division (NeGD), which functions under MeitY, issued the award after a quality-and-cost based selection process. An evaluation document dated September 24 shows CoRover scoring 100 points, ahead of Kyndryl Solutions, which received 91.24.
Tender process and competition
Government tender records show four firms bid for the project, titled "Unified AI Assistant & Bot." Cactus Technology Solutions and NEC Corporation India were eliminated during technical evaluation, leaving CoRover and Kyndryl in the final round. CoRover was then awarded the work at roughly Rs 3.63 crore.
The company has separately stated that the wider request-for-proposal process drew more than 80 participants, among them Deloitte, EY, PwC, KPMG, Tata Consultancy Services, NEC, Kyndryl and Jio Haptik. It said six firms were empanelled after technical and commercial review, and that it topped the technical scores and held the lowest-bidder (L1) position on price.
What the platform will do
The project aims to build a reusable conversational and agentic AI framework that many departments can adopt, rather than a standalone chatbot for DigiLocker alone. The broader goal is an "ask, do and escalate" model, in which assistants answer citizen queries, carry out tasks and pass cases to human staff when needed.
DigiLocker will serve as the minimum viable product. Its first bot is expected to fetch and share authentic documents from source systems and help users manage their records through a conversational interface. The implementation is due within four months, split into foundation and go-live milestones, and followed by 12 months of operations and maintenance support.
Because the system relies on large language models and agentic technology, the tender requires an AI governance layer. This covers version control for prompts and models, approval and rollback mechanisms, validation of tool inputs, and protection against prompt injection and jailbreak attempts. The platform must also support human-in-the-loop workflows and track agent behaviour, tool calls, task completion, failures, response delays and AI-related costs.
CoRover's technology
CoRover describes its sovereign AI platform as multilingual across more than 100 languages, with support for multimodal, multichannel and multimodel deployments. It runs on BharatGPT foundational models and the company's proprietary four-layer Composite AI Architecture.
By the company's own account, that architecture blends classic natural language processing, agentic retrieval-augmented generation, general large language models and an internet layer, and is built around accuracy, explainability, security and cost efficiency.
The framework is meant to go beyond DigiLocker, letting departments deploy agentic AI without building separate systems for every service. The contract reflects the government's shift from simple chatbots towards AI that can interact with official systems, complete tasks and escalate cases requiring human judgment.
