In a significant leadership consolidation within India’s digital governance framework, the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Saurabh Vijay, is set to take additional charge as the head of the IndiaAI Mission. The development comes weeks after former IndiaAI Mission CEO Abhishek Singh was reassigned as Director General of the National Testing Agency, leaving the position vacant amid a broader bureaucratic reshuffle. The strategic decision aims to bring unprecedented synergy between India’s foundation-level digital public identity systems and its rapidly evolving sovereign artificial intelligence goals.
Vijay, a 1998-batch IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre with a civil engineering background from IIT Delhi, assumed charge at UIDAI in mid-May 2026 and will now dual-manage both organizations. By aligning the leadership of UIDAI and IndiaAI, the government plans to leverage large-scale operational expertise to accelerate cloud computing infrastructure, foster indigenous multilingual foundational models, and streamline secure, data-driven public services across the country. Under Singh’s previous tenure, India successfully activated 38,000 GPUs and pushed for shared compute infrastructure to support startups and researchers.
Ensuring operational continuity during this transition, Kavita Bhatia will continue in her role as the Chief Operating Officer of the IndiaAI Mission. Bringing over 24 years of extensive experience in e-governance, Bhatia previously worked on foundational digital authentication frameworks that support secure service delivery for over 1.3 billion users. Her deep expertise in managing massive digital public infrastructure is expected to play a critical role as the mission scales its national computing capabilities and enterprise AI deployments.
