Organizations across India are racing to take AI applications from experimentation to full-scale production, but the bottleneck is almost never the AI model—it's the data layer. That's why data infrastructure skills are so important to the AI economy, and it's why we're so excited to share that today at MongoDB .local Bengaluru, we announced plans to upskill two million Indian builders by 2030 through new local language initiatives and regional partnerships. The expanded MongoDB for Academia program will help equip the next generation of builders with the cloud, data, and AI skills required to scale India’s digital economy.
Since its launch in September 2023, the MongoDB for Academia program in India has trained more than 650,000 students through partnerships with the Ministry of Education’s All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), SmartBridge, ICT Academy, and leading universities.
To continue supporting India’s goal of building an ecosystem that fosters AI innovation, MongoDB is increasing its academia program investment. New initiatives include work with HCL GUVI to make the MongoDB curriculum available in Kannada, Hindi, and Tamil languages. The program is also expanding into new regions through an initiative with the ICT Academy of Kerala (ICTAK) to empower more than 100 institutions to deliver training to students across the state.
MongoDB will also deepen its collaboration with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to help students keep pace with the rapid evolution of the AI landscape through their joint Virtual Internship Programme.
"In India, we have a massive opportunity with AI to transform our economy and the lives of our citizens. But to take advantage of it, our developers must have the right skills,” said Dr. Buddha Chandrasekhar CEO, Anuvadini AI, Ministry of Education, and Chief Coordinating Officer, AICTE, Ministry of Education, Government of India. “While the technology is changing fast, the importance of strong data skills remains a constant foundation for any builder. We are excited to expand our partnership with MongoDB to ensure every Indian student has access to the tools they need to succeed in the AI era, regardless of what language they speak or where they live."
Bridging the AI skills gap for Indian builders
The training provided through the program is important, as many Indian organizations struggle to find builders who have the skills to build modern, AI-enabled applications. A May 2026 report from the trade association for India’s IT industry, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), and Indeed found that a lack of AI readiness among employees is a major challenge for Indian employers*. NASSCOM previously predicted that India will need around six million digital roles by 2028, many of which will be AI-focused, but the available talent pool was forecast to be just 4.7 million workers.
The government of India is currently spearheading national initiatives designed to democratize access to computing, to enhance data quality, develop indigenous AI capabilities, attract top AI talent, and enable industry collaboration. The success of this strategy will depend on building a large industry-ready workforce capable of mastering the complex data architectures that fuel modern innovation.
To support these national goals and to upskill two million builders by 2030, MongoDB plans to set up partnerships with more than 1,500 institutions in India and to provide hands-on training and curriculum support to 5,000 educators.
Through these partnerships, MongoDB for Academia will provide curriculum resources, educator enablement, technology credits, skill badges, and certifications to equip the next generation of builders with practical database and AI skills.
As part of that expansion, MongoDB will work closely with the premier educational organizations like Birla Institute of Technology & Science, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, KL University Hyderabad, and Ramaiah Institute of Technology, who will integrate modern database concepts and MongoDB expertise directly into their curriculums.
"MongoDB's founding mission was to make data incredibly easy for builders to work with,” said Raghu Viswanathan, Vice President, Education, Academia and Documentation at MongoDB. “This mission is as important as ever because the hard part about building AI in production isn't the model. It's the data layer underneath it."
"That's exactly why we're so committed to expanding modern database skills to be available in more languages and more regions so we can help India's next generation of great builders thrive in the AI era," Viswanathan added.
MongoDB in India
MongoDB is a unified AI data platform designed to give organizations and builders what they need to run agents in production—a real-time database, full text and vector search, memory, embeddings, and reranker models—all in one platform.
Currently, MongoDB serves half of the top 100 companies in India (by market capitalization), and more than 50 of the country's unicorn start-ups (private companies worth more than a billion dollars) rely on MongoDB's data platform. Customers include Pine Labs, Tata Digital, Adani Digital, Zomato, Zepto, Observe.AI, and Emergent.
With more than 700 employees in the region and offices in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Gurgaon, MongoDB has been making significant investments in India for more than a decade. Local teams include go-to-market functions, human resources, and finance, as well as important technical roles like consultancy and a dedicated engineering team, which was launched last year. The India engineering team is responsible for building a number of mission-critical pieces of the MongoDB platform, including the management plane for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, key pieces of MongoDB’s modernization platform, and features that will be launching soon.
Next Steps
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* https://nasscom.in/knowledge-center/publications/indias-ai-talent-inflection-point-skill-gaps-competitive-advantage#dwn-report