As India accelerates its digital governance journey, strengthening the capabilities of civil servants has become central to delivering efficient, citizen-centric public services. Through Mission Karmayogi and the iGOT Karmayogi platform, the Government of India is leveraging digital technologies and artificial intelligence to create a continuous, competency-driven learning ecosystem for public officials across the country. Shri Rakesh Verma, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Karmayogi Bharat, in an exclusive interaction with Nijhum Rudra of Elets News Network (ENN), shares how the iGOT Karmayogi platform has evolved into one of the world’s largest digital learning ecosystems for government officials, the growing role of AI in capacity building, and the vision of positioning iGOT as a globally relevant Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Edited excerpts.
How has the iGOT Karmayogi platform evolved in scale and outreach since its inception?
Since its operationalisation nearly three years ago with a modest base of two lakh enrollees and eighty courses in January 2023, the iGOT Karmayogi platform has achieved phenomenal proliferation, now serving 1.7 crore civil servants across the Central Government, States, Union Territories, urban local bodies, and panchayat tiers.
This extraordinary expansion reflects meticulous stakeholder orchestration, encompassing premier government training institutions from the Centre and States, alongside collaborative alliances with academia and industry leaders. The resultant repository of over 5,500 diverse courses underscores the platform’s commitment to comprehensive and inclusive capacity building, positioning it as an unparalleled national asset in public service excellence.
This year’s Sadhana Saptah, National Learning Week, further reflected the widespread adoption of the platform, with over 3.19 crore course completions and 4.48 crore learning hours recorded during the initiative. More than 33.4 lakh employees completed four hours of learning, with substantial participation from frontline government officials across States and Union Territories.
In what manner is artificial intelligence being integrated to bolster AI competencies among civil servants?
Artificial intelligence has assumed a pivotal role in Mission Karmayogi, with over 200 specialised courses meticulously designed to cultivate essential AI proficiencies, ranging from ethical frameworks and governance protocols to advanced prompting techniques and prudent usage guidelines.
To date, AI-related courses on the platform have recorded over 3.5 crore completions, establishing India as a global frontrunner in large-scale governmental AI skilling.
During the recently organised Sadhana Saptah, National Learning Week 2026, over 36.5 lakh employees across the Central and State/UT Governments completed at least one AI course on iGOT.
This concerted endeavour, reinforced through strategic ecosystem partnerships, ensures that civil servants acquire not merely technical acumen but also the nuanced discernment required for responsible AI adoption across diverse administrative domains
What innovative AI tools have been deployed on the iGOT platform to enhance capacity building?
The platform has recently introduced several sophisticated AI-powered instruments, foremost among them the AI Capacity Building Plan Tool, which instantaneously generate a comprehensive first draft upon uploading work allocation orders, scheme documents, or ministerial annual reports, compressing what traditionally required six to twelve months into mere minutes.
Complementing this is the AI-enabled multilingual transcription feature, rendering every course accessible in multiple regional languages to foster contextual and culturally resonant learning.
Other newly introduced AI applications include iGOT AI Sarthi, a conversational assistant that helps officials quickly find relevant courses and resources on iGOT. It understands role-based queries in simple language, improving discoverability and enabling targeted, contextual learning.
The iGOT AI Tutor, embedded within courses, provides real-time support by simplifying concepts, summarising key ideas, and answering queries, making learning more interactive and easier to apply on the job.
Additionally, AI-driven assessment generators now produce tiered evaluations—basic, intermediate, and advanced, tailored to specific roles, while hyper-personalised learning pathways are being refined to align individual aspirations, such as becoming an AI architect, with bespoke pedagogical trajectories.
How does AI facilitate the assessment of competency gaps and recommend targeted interventions?
AI facilitates the assessment of competency gaps by creating a data-driven linkage between an official’s role, responsibilities, required competencies, and existing learning or proficiency levels.
On iGOT Karmayogi, AI can support role-to-competency mapping by analysing designations, departments, functions, and work contexts, and then identifying the competencies required for effective performance. This enables Ministries, States, and Departments to move from generic training needs to more precise, role-based capacity requirements.
AI also helps aggregate and analyse competency gaps at multiple levels—individual, designation, department, sector, State/UT, and Ministry level. By examining patterns across roles and departments, AI can identify common domain, behavioural, and functional gaps.
For example, it can highlight whether officials in a particular department require greater capacity in procurement, project monitoring, digital governance, public finance, citizen service delivery, or sector-specific implementation. This allows capacity-building plans to be based on actual demand rather than assumptions. Based on these identified gaps, AI can recommend targeted interventions such as relevant courses, learning pathways, assessments, refresher modules, case studies, or blended training programmes.
Can AI-driven analytics effectively personalise learning pathways for civil servants?
Absolutely. AI-driven analytics can effectively personalise learning pathways for civil servants, and iGOT Karmayogi is moving in this direction through a combination of capabilities already implemented and further enhancements planned under the iGOT 2.0 roadmap.
Several foundational elements are already in place on iGOT, including role-based course discovery, competency-aligned content, specialisations, assessments, dashboards, and learning recommendations. These capabilities are helping shift the platform from generic course access to more structured and role-relevant capacity building for officials across Ministries, States, and Departments.
This will be further strengthened through deeper AI-enabled role and competency mapping, AI-based capacity planning, adaptive learning pathways, and hyper-personalised recommendations.
The platform will be able to recommend learning journeys based on an official’s role, responsibilities, competency mapping and gaps, learning history, proficiency level, and future aspirations. This approach will help iGOT evolve into a more intelligent, demand-driven, and competency-led capacity-building ecosystem. It will support targeted skill development, faster capability building, and long-term career progression, while ensuring that learning remains aligned with institutional priorities and real administrative requirements.
What safeguards have been instituted to guarantee ethical AI utilisation, data privacy, and transparency on iGOT Karmayogi?
iGOT Karmayogi follows a responsible and privacy-conscious approach to AI, where AI is used as an assistive layer for learning recommendations, competency mapping, content creation, assessment support, translation, and learner support. AI-generated outputs are not treated as final decisions. Instead, they are reviewed through human-in-the-loop validation by domain experts, content teams, or authorised stakeholders before use or publication.
AI-assisted content, assessments, subtitles, and translations are checked for accuracy, bias, relevance, hallucination risk, and alignment with government rules, schemes, and policies.
Transparency and accountability are maintained through traceability of source documents, SME validation, review status, and clear ownership of AI-assisted outputs. Overall, AI on iGOT is positioned as a support mechanism to improve scale, speed, and personalisation while ensuring human oversight, data privacy, ethical use, security, and institutional accountability.
How is iGOT Karmayogi being positioned as a Digital Public Infrastructure with international relevance?
iGOT Karmayogi is being positioned as a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for capacity building by demonstrating how a population-scale, open, and interoperable learning platform can support continuous competency development of government officials.
It goes beyond a conventional Learning Management System (LMS) by integrating role-based learning, competency mapping, content marketplaces, assessments, dashboards, multilingual access, AI-enabled recommendations, and capacity planning. This makes it a reusable public digital platform for building institutional capability across sectors, departments, and levels of government.
Its international relevance comes from the fact that many countries face similar challenges in strengthening civil service capacity, improving last-mile governance, standardising training quality, and enabling continuous learning for public officials. The iGOT model offers a scalable and adaptable DPI approach where countries can configure their own learning ecosystems, onboard national training institutions, curate local content, map roles and competencies, and use data and AI to identify capacity gaps. The launch of iGOT for Mauritius has already demonstrated its potential as a capacity-building Digital Public Infrastructure. Many countries from the Global South have also shown interest in the iGOT model, given its relevance for civil service transformation, last-mile governance, and continuous capacity building at scale.
Its modular architecture, open-source orientation, AI-enabled capabilities, multilingual design, and competency-led approach make it well suited for countries seeking scalable, adaptable, and sovereign digital platforms for strengthening public sector capabilities.