IIMC sets up AI academy for India’s media and entertainment industry

NEW DELHI: India’s premier media training institution is going all-in on artificial intelligence. The Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC) launched the AIME Academy (AI Academy for Media and Entertainment) in New Delhi on Thursday, positioning itself as a national centre of excellence for AI in media and entertainment at a moment when newsrooms across the country are scrambling to keep pace with the technology.

The inauguration was led by Chanchal Kumar, secretary of the ministry of information and broadcasting, alongside IIMC vice chancellor Pragya Paliwal Gaur and Manish Gupta, senior director at Google DeepMind India. The occasion also doubled as a graduation ceremony for more than 110 newsroom professionals, media educators and students who completed a ten-week hybrid AI skills training programme spanning over 100 newsrooms and media colleges across 23 cities and more than ten Indian languages.

The academy is built on five pillars: capacity building, research, innovation and incubation, responsible AI policy development, and strategic collaboration. Its ambitions are sweeping. IIMC intends to develop India-specific training modules, support applied research on AI in journalism, document how newsrooms are adopting the technology, and promote its responsible use across the Indian media ecosystem. With six campuses in New Delhi, Dhenkanal, Jammu, Aizawl, Amravati and Kottayam, the institute is well placed to build language-specific AI capacity at scale, bringing India’s multilingual, multilayered media realities into a global conversation long dominated by Western voices.

The graduating cohort had trained on Google’s AI tools, including NotebookLM, Gemini, AI Studio and Pinpoint, under a programme run in partnership with Google News Initiative and How India Lives. Between them, participants logged more than 40 hours of training and one-on-one mentoring, produced over 170 AI-powered projects and published pieces, and built more than 50 apps through vibe coding.

Addressing the gathering, Chanchal Kumar was unambiguous about where the boundaries lie. “AI may be used as an assistant, but not as a substitute for editorial responsibility,” he said. “It may improve speed, but not at the cost of accuracy. It may support creativity, but not at the cost of authenticity. The role of human judgement will become even more important in the AI age.” He framed the government’s broader approach to AI as positive, enabling and responsible, rooted in the prime minister’s twin directives of “Make AI in India” and “Make AI Work for India.”

The message was pointed. As AI tools grow cheaper, faster and more persuasive, the temptation for cash-strapped newsrooms to outsource editorial decisions to algorithms will only intensify. IIMC is betting that if it can train enough journalists to use these tools wisely, India’s media will be shaped by its reporters rather than by its machines. That is a race worth running.