Center for Developing Intelligent Systems · IIT Kanpur

Intelligent systemsfor the scaleof India.

An R&D center within IIT Kanpur, dedicated to the rapid development and prototyping of intelligent software systems for problems arising within the Indian ecosystem — from public grievances and health to exams, cities and defence.

Scroll

The problem

A little voice lost in a labyrinth.

  1. A grievance

    It starts with one person, writing in.

    “I have a problem with officials in Dept XYZ. They have been harassing and threatening me and asking for bribes …”
  2. Enters system → becomes a datum

    The grievance enters the system and becomes a datum. It travels to the department — and comes back disposed.

    “Inadequate documents to evaluate claims. No further action possible, hence disposed”
  3. Giant filing system

    Every statistic a post office could give you — where grievances have come from, where they were going, how long the transit took. But it can’t tell you what was in them.

  4. 21st-century information processing

    Use AI to understand documents as sets of concepts. A search for “Officials asking for bribes to issue certificates” — retrieves all relevant grievances.

CDIS built that search engine for the Ministry of Defence — then the Prime Minister’s Office asked for it across all Government departments and ministries.

Featured system · Ministry of Defence · DARPG · QCI · NIC

Public Grievances

A novel search engine for public grievances, first deployed at the Ministry of Defence — and, at the Prime Minister’s Office’s request, being implemented across Government departments and ministries.

Filed & disposedState-wiseDistrict-wiseMinistry-wise

Illustrative — not a product screenshot

CPGRAMS app splash screen: Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Government of India — CDIS, IIT-Kanpur.
  • Voice-to-text in English, Hindi & other Indian languages
  • Predictive grievance submission
  • Dashboard for tracking grievances
  • OTP verification
MoU with DARPG
14 Dec 2021
IGMS 2.0 launched
29 Sep 2023by Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State
Silver Award
2021–22National Awards for e-Governance — Outstanding research on Citizen Centric Services by Academic/Research Institution

What it reveals

  • Evidence of implementation problems
  • Evidence of systemic problems

Applications

  • Emergency warning/dispatch system
  • Root cause analysis
  • Reflexivity analysis
  • Officer accountability
Diagram: complaints enter the system, an AI analyzer identifies the gist, and a search retrieves all relevant grievances.
Complaints → AI Analyzer → retrieval · From the project · iitk.ac.in/cdis
Diagram: semantic-search-powered grievance retrieval feeding emergency warning and dispatch, root cause analysis, reflexivity analysis and officer accountability.
Applications · From the project · iitk.ac.in/cdis
Slide contrasting 19th-century information processing, racks of overflowing files, with 21st-century processing, where AI reads documents as sets of concepts.
19th- vs 21st-century information processing · From the project · iitk.ac.in/cdis

Approach

From concept to deployment.

CDIS operates as a hybrid of an academic center with a central translational focus — hosting the equipment and experts that turn cutting-edge concepts into working prototypes.

  1. 01

    Go where the problem lives.

    We understand government schemes by visiting individual ministries, in Delhi and the states — and after analysing the processes, we give quality, technical feedback to improve them.

  2. 02

    Scope it honestly.

    We consult clients on resource constraints, data privacy, modeling, budgets and timelines.

  3. 03

    Prototype fast.

    Engineers and IIT Kanpur’s domain experts rapidly convert cutting-edge concepts into working prototypes, for clients from within and outside IITK.

  4. 04

    Deploy — and redesign the process.

    We don’t only develop the technology; we redesign the underlying processes so that the last-mile delivery is ensured.

Behind it: research with IIT Kanpur students, researchers and engineers on real-world problems, and teaching DevOps with an AI/ML focus.

Capabilities

What we build.

Each capability below is proven by named projects — open any card’s projects in the Work section.

Language & grievance intelligence

Semantic search over grievances, root-cause analysis, tone and category of feedback, natural-language queries for officers.

Proven by

Fraud & anomaly detection

Insurance-claim fraud flagged before payout; anomalies in hand-filled forms; collusion mapped across provider networks.

Proven by

Forecasting & decision science

White-box demand forecasts, energy and pollution prediction for city digital twins, and cognitive-science models of skill.

Proven by

Computer vision

Parcel boundaries from drone imagery without supervised learning, impersonation checks, container IDs, exam-hall anomalies.

Proven by

Document AI & archives

Handwritten Hindi OCR with voice editing, forms to HTML/SQL, invoice extraction, semantic search across publications.

Proven by

Routing & geospatial

Reinforcement-learned emergency routing, black-spot risk scores, patrol routes and hospital referral in real time.

Proven by

Platforms for whole systems

Data integrated across a state’s databases, digital health services, one view across 23 IITs.

Proven by

Trustworthy & secure AI

Privacy-preserving benchmarking of medical AI, health-data exchange without copies, cyber-physical security.

Proven by

Built for India’s last mile

Voice-to-text in Indian languages, an India-stack for AI services, help that arrives on WhatsApp.

Proven by

Work

Eight sectors. 39 systems.

Built for ministries, state governments, public agencies and industry. Open any project for the full description — with the project’s own diagrams and screenshots where the CDIS site has them.

01

Governance & grievances

Where a citizen’s voice meets the machinery of the state.

4 projects

02

Welfare & pensions

Finding the families and pensioners the system cannot see.

3 projects

03

Health

From pilgrim-scale emergencies to insurance claims.

6 projects

04

Law, policing & regulation

Evidence for the institutions that keep order.

4 projects

05

Exams & education

Integrity for exams, and patience for every student.

7 projects

06

Defence & cybersecurity

Archives, sensors and the infrastructure behind them.

4 projects

07

Cities, mobility & infrastructure

Ports, highways, fields and whole cities, read as data.

7 projects

08

Energy & enterprise

Forecasts and automation for industry.

4 projects

Record

The record so far.

In numbers

  • 500,000+pages of handwritten Hindi investigation records digitized for UP Police’s anti-corruption organizationUP Anti Corruption Org
  • 18ACO units have adopted itUP Anti Corruption Org
  • ₹45 croresaved in six months by AI health-insurance fraud detection built with NHA (as of July 2023)NHA fraud analytics
  • 10 million+players’ data used to test the skill-versus-chance pipeline, across more than 25 gamesSkill or Chance
  • 3.2%MAPE on the full 2024 dataset — electricity demand forecasting for AEMLElectricity Demand Forecasting
  • 1.45 crorehouseholds, approximately — roughly 85% of Andhra Pradesh — in the Beneficiary Intelligence System’s scopeBeneficiary Intelligence System

Institutions we have built for and with

  • Ministry of Defence
  • Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances
  • National Testing Agency
  • EY
  • UP Police
  • Apollo Hospitals
  • C3iHub, IIT Kanpur
  • MECON Limited
  • ACT
  • Tower Research
  • Quality Council of India
  • NIC
  • National Health Authority
  • Government of Uttar Pradesh
  • Haryana State Government
  • Government of Andhra Pradesh
  • Ministry of Education
  • Ministry of Shipping, Ports and Waterways
  • Ministry of Road Transport & Highways
  • Department of Consumer Affairs
  • Department of Pension & Pensioners’ Welfare
  • Staff Selection Commission
  • ECHS
  • NCIIPC
  • Kanpur Police Commissionerate
  • Kanpur Municipal Corporation
  • ICICI Foundation
  • Adani Group
  • Adani Total Gas
  • Adani Electricity Mumbai
  • Wadhwani Foundation
  • Aarav Unmanned Systems

Milestones

  1. MoU with DARPG to upgrade CPGRAMS with AI capabilities

  2. Silver Award, National Awards for e-Governance — Public Grievances

  3. Root cause analysis added to the Ministry of Defence’s grievance system

  4. Approved as a permanent Center of IIT Kanpur

  5. Adaptive Routing shown at IInvenTiv 2022, where all 23 IITs display their best innovations

  6. NHA fraud detection saves ₹45 crore in six months

  7. IGMS 2.0 launched by Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State

  8. IIT Kanpur signs an MoU with the Government of Uttar Pradesh for the UP Digital Health Stack

    Officials exchange MoU documents at the signing ceremony between IIT Kanpur and the Government of Uttar Pradesh.
  9. One of 5 teams shortlisted for the AI Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Cities

    Ministry of Education poster: Sustainable Cities proposals in Phase-1.
  10. Leading one of the three AI Centres of Excellence — sustainable cities

  11. RT-BARP brings real-time availability and referral to Maha Kumbh Mela area hospitals

  12. NEET 2026: CCTV analytics cover centres nationwide in a single exam window

Silver Award · National Awards for e-Governance 2021–22

“Outstanding research on Citizen Centric Services by Academic/Research Institution” — Public Grievances

People

The people behind it.

A permanent Center of IIT Kanpur since 2022 — a unique hybrid of an academic center with a central translational focus.

  • CoordinatorNitin Saxena
  • Workshop ForemanNisheeth Srivastava

Engineering

  • Harikrishna PSoftware Architect Grade-3
  • Manish KumarSoftware Engineer Grade-3
  • Jayant MalikSoftware Engineer Grade-2
  • Vimal Kumar NeezSoftware Engineer Grade-2
  • Bharat MishraSoftware Engineer Grade-2
  • Harshit SrivastavaSoftware Architect Grade-1
  • Shubhendu SarvagyaSoftware Engineer Grade-1
  • Tanmay KhatriSoftware Engineer Grade-1
  • AkashSoftware Engineer Grade-0
  • Abhishek PathakSoftware Engineer Grade-0

Management

  • Upendra PandeyManager Grade-3
  • Devendra TiwariManager Grade-1
  • Ravi NishadManager Grade-0
  • Anish ChandraManager Grade-0

Domain experts

Manindra Agrawal Amitabha Bandyopadhyay Soumya Dutta Purushottam Kar Preeti Malakar Ashutosh Modi Piyush Rai Ketan Rajawat Indranil Saha Indra S. Sen Shalabh Dootika Vats Hamim Zafar Sruti Ragavan Sayak Ray Chowdhury Sachchida Nand Tripathi

Students of associated faculty working for CDIS.

Careers

Build with us.

Software engineers

Where
On-site at IIT Kanpur — there’s no remote option, but CDIS helps you find accommodation.
Contract
One year, renewable, with attractive benefits.
Compensation
6 to 30 LPA, depending on the interview performance and the value a candidate adds.
Interviews
In person — CDIS reaches out with enough slots to choose from.
The work
Something new every time — see the projects above.
Write to cdis@iitk.ac.in

Contact

Bring us the problem.

CDIS rapidly converts cutting-edge concepts into working prototypes — for clients from within and outside IIT Kanpur.

cdis@iitk.ac.in

Labs 601 & 602, Engineering Science Building 2, IIT Kanpur

Loading project…