Bharat Digital India Full Time

Applications are now open for the third cohort of the Build for Bharat Fellowship, and we’d love your help spreading the word across FOSS Clubs and communities in India.

We need more FOSS folks in gov-tech! :)

The Build for Bharat Fellowship is a paid, six-month programme that places early-career engineers, designers and AI practitioners inside government departments. Fellows work alongside government teams on real projects, improving public systems used by millions of people.

FOSS communities have a strong spirit of building for the public good, and we believe they have a lot to contribute to government technology. Most projects across our first two cohorts were built using FOSS, and some fellows have even open-sourced their work.

We hope to bring more FOSS talent into government and, in turn, encourage greater adoption of open-source technologies in public systems.

What fellows get Real-world experience: Work on live government projects, interact with users and understand how public services operate.

Learning and mentorship: An orientation, regular reviews and expert office hours with practitioners such as Kailash Nadh (CTO, Zerodha), Rukmini S (Founder, Data for India) and Devanshi Sihare (TinkerLabs).

A community: Learn alongside other fellows and connect with people working in public technology.

Some projects from past cohorts Official statistics: Built MoSPI’s eSankhyiki MCP server, making official statistics accessible to AI assistants. This was open-sourced by the government. https://github.com/nso-india/esankhyiki-mcp

Rural libraries: Developed Arivu Mitra, a WhatsApp companion for Gram Panchayat librarians in Karnataka using Whatomate https://shridarpatil.github.io/whatomate/.

Transport: Built a transit analytics dashboard for Chennai’s transport authority and NHAI's Annual Pass web and app which has helped sell 1 Cr Annual Passes in a year.

Citizen services: Redesigned Tamil Nadu’s e-Sevai services, IRCTC ticket UI, e-swathu, etc., to improve the citizen experience.

On-prem AI: Setup on-prem inference for open-weight models in Centre for Smart Governance, Government of Karnataka's 300 strong staff.

Explore more projects

Fellowship at a glance Duration: January–June 2027 (6 months, on-site)

Location: On-site at a partner government department

Stipend: ₹40,000 per month

Eligibility: Indian citizens graduating in 2027 or who completed their latest degree in 2024–2026, with demonstrable skills in Engineering, Design or AI

Application deadline: 18 October 2026, 11:59 PM IST

Apply here: https://bharatdigital.org/fellowship

Information webinar: https://www.youtube.com/live/vLIrjC4ri9M