Purpose of the Pool
To fund rapid, open-source AI prototypes that solve hyperlocal challenges in India using transparent, replicable, and low-cost tooling. The goal is to support builders and community innovators via micro-funding for creating AI prototypes that empower real-world problem-solving, from agriculture and education to civic tech and healthcare.
Key Criteria for Funding:
Preference to experiments using OSS tooling (e.g., Ollama, LangChain, Pinecone, Hugging Face, etc.)
The code must be published with a permissive license (MIT, Apache-2.0, etc.)
Should be deployable via lightweight frontends (e.g., Streamlit, Vercel, Gradio)
The use case must be relevant to a local community or system
Preference for low-compute, low-dependency models (encourage edge-ready AI)
Example Use Cases
Chatbot for navigating government schemes in local languages
Local seed or soil advisory for farmers using RAG from Krishi Vigyan Kendra docs
Civic engagement bot summarizing municipal budgets or RTI replies
Offline-ready AI assistant for microentrepreneurs (inventory, pricing, finance)
WhatsApp-integrated career guidance bot for rural youth using open data
Proposal Template Requirements
Each proposal should include:
Title + Summary
Local Problem: What challenge are you solving and for whom?
Tech Stack: Which OSS tools/models are being used?
Link to GitHub: (can be WIP, must be public)
Demo / UI Plan: Streamlit, Vercel, etc.