Got an AI Solution for Infrastructure? Rodic Consultants and Nasscom Are Opening the Door

India is constructing infrastructure at a scale that makes efficiency, safety, and resilience increasingly challenging to maintain through traditional methods alone. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been proposed as a solution for years, yet a gap persists between possessing the technology and implementing it effectively. Rodic Consultants, a leading infrastructure and engineering consultancy in India, aims to bridge this gap by launching the Rodic InfraAI Innovation Challenge 2026 in collaboration with Nasscom, Google Cloud, and Startup India.

This groundbreaking national initiative seeks to expedite the adoption of AI across India's infrastructure and strategic sectors. Unlike other innovation challenges that provide participants with hypothetical scenarios, this challenge utilizes real projects drawn from Rodic's live infrastructure projects. By doing so, participating startups, researchers, and academic teams gain access to genuine project contexts rather than sanitized case studies.

The challenge is structured around four priority themes: AI for India Energy Stack, AI for Roads, Bridges and Tunnels, AI for Climate-Resilient Infrastructure, and GenAI for Public Works and Citizen Benefit Delivery. These themes align with national infrastructure needs, such as digital public infrastructure, asset monitoring, defect detection, predictive maintenance, renewable forecasting, and multilingual AI assistants for public services.

The challenge's success relies on partnerships with Nasscom, Google Cloud, and Startup India, which provide access to India's deep-tech and AI startup community, cloud infrastructure, and a wide network of DPIIT-recognized startups, respectively. Raj Kumar, CMD of Rodic Consultants, emphasizes the potential of AI to transform infrastructure planning, building, and management, stating that the challenge aims to identify technologies that can be tested, deployed, and scaled on live projects.

Ankit Bose, Head of AI at Nasscom, highlights the challenge's value for tech startups, offering access to real industry problem statements, expert mentorship, and a pathway to deployment. Successful startups will receive a prize pool of Rs 30 lakh and gain exposure to Rodic's infrastructure expertise, a pilot partnership program to validate their solution on a live project, and a potential route to commercial deployment and strategic investment.

This challenge is open to AI and deep-tech startups, academic and research teams, and innovators with existing technology.