In May, startup founders, designers and remote workers opened their laptops in the beach shacks of Baga, between sessions on AI and robotics and breaks for water sports. It was called the Goa Shackathon. Five months later, the same state government released a three-year AI policy. Rohan Khaunte, who holds both the tourism and the IT portfolios, sees the two events as one argument.
The Goa AI Policy 2026 was unveiled on 22 October at the state’s first AI Tech Conclave, held under the theme “AI for People, Planet and Progress.” Aligned with the Goa AI Mission 2027, it sets a three-year roadmap for 2026–29 to make Goa “India’s responsible AI and Applied Innovation hub,” with the stated aims of empowering citizens, modernising public governance, preserving local heritage and driving high-value economic growth. Its headline target is to certify 50,000 youth in AI by 2030.
The policy rests on five pillars. Skilling and capacity building creates a talent pipeline from school classrooms to the workforce. Startups and industry enablement offers local startups, MSMEs and enterprises incubation, regulatory sandboxes and live state department testbeds. Capital and investment promises structured financial incentives, subsidies and access to funding to speed up AI deployment.
Policy, governance and infrastructure covers access to high-performance GPU compute facilities, secure data repositories and digital public infrastructure. The fifth pillar, responsible, safe and ethical AI, commits the state to risk-tiered safeguards, human oversight and data privacy.
In an interview at the AI Conclave, Khaunte was asked the question every investor is thinking: how does a state globally known for leisure convince the world that it is a serious destination for deep tech and global capability centres? His answer was not to deny the beaches.
Turning the postcard into a pitch
Tourism is Goa’s main economic contributor, Khaunte said, at about 16.43 per cent of GDP. He does not treat it as a handicap. He treats it as the state’s most distinctive raw material.
He has made this long-game argument before. As IT Minister under Manohar Parrikar, he was part of the launch of Goa’s startup and IT policy in 2017, when, he recalls, the country was asking whether Goa had missed the bus. His case then was that legacy can be a burden, as states such as Karnataka know, because they must keep carrying it while they transition. Goa started with Industry 4.0, with 3D, machine learning, AR and VR, and moved on to AI startups.
When Covid turned work-from-home into the norm, Goa treated it as “an opportunity out of adversity” and recast it as work from Goa. The state then did something deliberate: it chose not to compete with the bigger tech hubs on their own terms.
“When we equate ourselves with other states like Bangalore or Telangana, we don’t want to be in those domains. We are talking about being in research and development, in innovation, in a space of creativity.”
The place itself, he argues, is the ingredient. “In that relaxation, your minds work differently and you get refreshed.” The Shackathon pods were built to prove it: people worked out of a shack, went water sports, ate fish curry and came back to their laptops. The same logic applies to digital nomads, whom Khaunte sees as high-income and high-talent visitors that Goa should convert into a permanent pipeline. The state wants them to live, build, invest and scale up in Goa, in niches such as research, innovation and design, while Goan youth are encouraged to see the world and then come back.
A model that speaks Konkani
The most concrete expression of the strategy is linguistic. Digital India BHASHINI is developing a Konkani large language model under a memorandum of understanding signed about six months ago with the IT department, working with the Higher Education Department and the Directorate of Official Languages. The aim is localised models for state governance.
Models like this need data, and Goa is collecting it from its people. Through BhashaDaan, BHASHINI’s crowdsourcing project, citizens, students and language experts can contribute text and audio. Alongside it, Granthika, a guided digitalisation workbench, engages elderly citizens to safeguard, digitise and open access to historical, legal and manuscript heritage.
The use case, Khaunte said in July, is deliberately ordinary. The Printing and Stationery Department, which prepares the official Konkani Gazette, currently uploads departmental notifications in English. His aim is a system in which farmers and other citizens receive government information directly in Konkani.
In the interview he added a commercial angle: a conversational tool that lets a shack operator talk to a customer from Poland, Russia, Tamil Nadu or Hyderabad in that customer’s own language, and understand the reply. BHASHINI itself is an Indian tool, he pointed out, and the Konkani model is, in his words, a source of pride.
Heritage is the other asset. Goa’s history is deeply layered, from the Kadambas to the Portuguese, and its old temples and churches and ageing destinations still need to be documented. At the conclave, the department signed an MoU with BITS Pilani Goa to establish an AI Centre of Excellence. Khaunte described it as the first in the country to work on “intricate knowledge systems and heritage intelligence.” His picture is a visitor who walks into an old temple or church and finds its story already told by AI.
Small enough to prove it
Goa has about 1.5 million people, and Khaunte turns that into an advantage: a state this size can test things quickly. Its IT graduates, he notes, spread across the country because there were no opportunities at home. The AI policy, he says, was written to be inclusive, for anyone with a dream and the energy to work for it, and not only for the IT fraternity.
Before launching the policy, his department ran a pilot. Twelve people were chosen from across Goa, from varied backgrounds and with minimal computer literacy. Some did not know how to start a laptop or what MS Word and Excel were. In one and a half months, he says, they went from nothing to AI-ready, and their experience fed into the policy. Reports from the conclave also noted a first batch of 10 AI trainees, trained by TAWAI Studio, some of whom have found jobs, including a placement at McLaren Strategic Solutions.
“It is not a paper that we are talking about. It is walking this particular talk.” Twelve is not the plan, he stressed. The plan is 50,000 by 2030, and the pilot is only “the first step.” The policy’s skilling pillar is meant to carry that well beyond adult retraining, building a pipeline that runs from school classrooms to the workforce.
The same instinct shapes governance. Goa’s Open Innovation Challenge took about 99 problem statements from government departments to the state’s youth and drew roughly 500 participants, with ideas on tourism, health, agriculture, climate and solid waste.
Inclusion runs through the other announcements. Twelve “Drone Didis” were felicitated at the conclave after completing foundational drone training and are moving to advanced courses. Khaunte says Goa was the third state to adopt the Namo Drone Didi policy, and he imagines women spraying fertiliser, working in media and running logistics with drones. A Mahila Digital Shakti Karan programme is training women in everything from UPI payments to listing a self-help group’s products on e-commerce platforms. The conclave also saw the launch of the “Living Library of Goa Rural AI” report by Hyprlocl.
The startup base is the proof point he leans on. Goa’s startups grew from 12 in 2017 to 651 by mid-2025, of which 310 were led by women, according to the minister’s own statement at the time. A more recent count put DPIIT-recognised startups at 803, and Khaunte put the figure at 850 in the interview. The Goa Startup Policy 2025 targets 1,000 startups and 10,000 jobs for Goans by 2028. “We want our people to be job givers,” he says, backed by governance, infrastructure and seed funding.
A hackathon with a deadline
The next step is the Goa AI Hackathon, launched at the conclave. It is designed to end in deployment and not just prototypes. The IT department has announced a phased strategy that connects government departments with startups, academic institutions and tech innovators to develop, mentor and deploy scalable, citizen-centric AI solutions for better public service delivery and operational efficiency.
Phase 1, with a completion target of December 2026, takes six high-impact departmental challenges straight into prototyping, validation and deployment. The Office of the Collector for North and South Goa wants an AI governance platform that automates public services, with OCR digitisation of records, eligibility verification, smart case management and compensation calculations across land, revenue, disaster and welfare administration.
The Goa Waste Management Corporation is looking for predictive maintenance of critical equipment, real-time tracking of waste infrastructure and optimisation of biodigesters and effluent treatment plants. The Department of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Services wants an emergency response platform with real-time incident reporting, GPS dispatch, resource allocation and tracking of animal shelters and rehabilitation.
The other three are closer to the state’s identity story. The Department of Handicrafts, Textile and Coir wants an AI cultural preservation platform that digitally archives traditional Goan crafts through pattern recognition, evaluates artisan skills and recommends personalised training. Goa Dental College and Hospital is seeking an oral health intelligence and clinical decision support platform, with electronic health record digitisation and disease-trend analytics for public healthcare planning. And the Directorate of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Government Polytechnic Mayem want an education analytics platform to streamline attendance, personalise learning pathways, flag at-risk learners early and optimise resources across technical and vocational institutes.
Phase 2 follows with nine more departmental problem statements, extending execution and solution development through March 2027. That makes 15 real problems in total, each with an owner inside government. The department says the approach should accelerate data-driven governance and improve administrative transparency.
Asked whether such a model could be plug-and-play for other small states, Khaunte was open about sharing it: nation-building, he said, cannot happen without states building each other. The deadlines make it easy to judge. December is about two months away.
Khaunte also addresses the fear that AI will displace those without formal training, such as shack owners, tour operators and artisans. He points to Industry 5.0, with its emphasis on a human touch over AI. In his words, AI cannot take over unless you allow it to, and he believes the data show more opportunities being created than lost, provided people reskill. His illustration is deliberately homely: a grandmother making curry and an AI that suggests chocolate. The point, he says, is whether you use your own mind over the machine.
Growth with a ceiling
Few technology ministers volunteer limits, but Khaunte did when asked about the energy and water footprint of data centres in a fragile coastal state. “We wouldn’t want to outgrow ourselves,” he said, and sustainability, in tune with the theme of the conclave and the state’s push for regenerative tourism, remains the key.
The regulatory answer is more layered than a simple either-or. Asked whether Goa would lean towards a light-touch regulatory sandbox to attract global capital or towards strict ethical compliance, Khaunte chose the second: “As of today, we are restricting ourselves to strict ethical AI,” and he expects to stay there. The policy itself, however, makes room for both. Regulatory sandboxes and live department testbeds give startups a place to experiment, while a risk-tiered governance model sets the guardrails.
Under that model, every AI system used by the state will be classified into one of four tiers: Prohibited, High-Risk, Medium-Risk or Low-Risk, so that oversight is proportionate to the stakes. Any high-risk system that affects citizen entitlements, healthcare or critical public services must have mandatory human oversight and a comprehensive algorithmic audit before it goes live. For a state that wants to be a preferred AI investment destination and testbed, the message is that trust, and not light-touch regulation, is the selling point.
Calling Goa’s diaspora home
The last leg of the strategy is people. Every state with a large diaspora, Khaunte says, has the same history: they left because opportunities were elsewhere. His first priority is the Goan who went abroad for lack of opportunities. “Why wouldn’t somebody want to come back to his own parents, to his own family?” At the conclave, the state unveiled a Diaspora Help Desk, a single-window portal to help global Goans mentor local talent, hire, invest and set up tech ventures. Khaunte says some have already returned from Silicon Valley and were exhibiting at the conclave’s stalls.
Physical infrastructure is coming too. He announced an IT Techno Centre in Porvorim, intended as a core hub for Goa’s tech ecosystem, with infrastructure, incubation spaces and collaborative work hubs under one roof. The policy also promises access to high-performance GPU compute facilities and secure data repositories; given Khaunte’s caution on energy, that is likely to mean a small, deliberate footprint and not a data-centre boom. The conclave’s panels included Goa as an AI-native GCC destination, and its participants included CoRover.ai, Adani Global Capability Centres and Quidich Innovation Labs.
Asked for a 30-second pitch to an investor in Bengaluru or San Francisco, Khaunte did not reach for tax breaks or square footage.
“Come meet us in Goa. Talk to us in Goa. We will do it for you.”
Goa will not out-scale Bengaluru, and it does not intend to try. Its wager is that identity can be a competitive advantage: a language no one else is building models for, a heritage that can be turned into data, a coastline that attracts the talent the state wants to retain, and a population small enough to pilot almost anything. The policy describes its approach as ethical, secure and time-bound, and its targets, six hackathon solutions by December 2026, 1,000 startups by 2028 and 50,000 AI-certified youth by 2030, are public, which means they can be checked.