Google on Thursday unveiled new open-source AI innovations and initiatives aimed at strengthening India’s agriculture sector and making AI models more sensitive to the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
The company launched the Agricultural Monitoring and Event Detection (AMED) API that provides information on crops and field activity across India, empowering the ecosystem to build targeted solutions that support agricultural productivity and resilience.
Researchers at Google DeepMind have also collaborated with IIT-Kharagpur to build localized datasets on India’s rich cultural tapestry as part of Google’s Amplify Initiative, aiming to help equip global Large Language Models with better linguistic and cultural context.
Speaking at a roundtable in Ananta, Google’s office in Bengaluru, Dr. Manish Gupta, Senior Director for India and APAC at Google DeepMind said, “At Google, along with charting new frontiers in foundational AI, which forms the backbone of many of our launches in the Gemini era, we have continued advancing fundamental research that addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity.’”
According to Alok Talekar, Lead, Agriculture and Sustainability Research Lead, Google DeepMind, with AI research and especially with AMED building on the foundation of ALU (Agricultural Landscape Understanding) , Google was working on accelerating crucial shifts, transforming broad insights to granular, real-time data, so that increasingly impactful solutions not only translate into benefit for India’s farmers, but also bolster the nation against rising climate risks.
Madhurima Maji, Lead Program Manager, Amplify Initiative for India at Google said, AI models could be even more helpful with a deeper understanding of the vastness and complexity of the lived human experience. “Through the Amplify Initiative, we are meticulously building the rich, hyperlocal context and cultural understanding that transforms raw information into profound knowledge. So that any and every Large Language Model can be fundamentally helpful and genuinely relevant to diverse realities,’‘ he added.
Dr. Mainack Mandal, Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur stated: “We’ve been inspired by the results this initiative has achieved in Sub-Saharan Africa, and look forward to ensuring that the groundwork we lay here translates into AI which is more responsive to India’s incredible plurality.”
According to Google, Amplify Initiative was piloted in Sub-Saharan Africa and has created an annotated dataset of over 8000 queries in seven African languages authored collaboratively with 155 experts, addressing a range of topics from chronic disease to misinformation.
In India, the local partner for the Amplify Initiative would begin building datasets related to specific issues, including in healthcare and safety, in multiple Indic languages, it added.
Published – July 10, 2025 08:42 pm IST