UPDATE — AUGUST 2025: Since its launch in October 2023, BharatGen has evolved from a research initiative into India’s flagship sovereign generative AI project, with concrete deployments and growing global recognition.
By mid-2024, the IIT Bombay–led consortium (with IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, and others) released pilot multilingual LLMs trained on Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, and more. These models were shared under open licensing for academic and startup use, mirroring India’s approach with UPI and Aadhaar as public digital goods.
In government services, BharatGen has been integrated into DigiLocker and UMANG apps to enable conversational AI in Indian languages, agriculture advisory platforms to deliver localized, crop-specific guidance, and healthcare chatbots for rural clinics. Public-sector banks, Indian Railways, and NPCI have also piloted BharatGen-powered voice interfaces, widening citizen access to digital services.
One of the initiative’s hallmark achievements has been its work on low-resource languages, including Santali, Konkani, and Manipuri, using data-efficient learning methods. This has positioned BharatGen as a model for inclusive AI development worldwide.
On the policy side, BharatGen has been aligned with the Digital India Act (draft 2024) and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP 2023), ensuring its compliance with India’s data sovereignty and privacy mandates. It is also receiving funding through India’s $2.4 billion AI and digital transformation budget, cementing its role as national infrastructure.
Internationally, BharatGen was showcased at the 2025 G20 Digital Economy Working Group as India’s “public-good AI” alternative to proprietary Western systems, reinforcing its positioning alongside the EU’s “AI made in Europe” and China’s ERNIE.
As of August 2025, BharatGen is live in multiple pilot deployments across government, finance, healthcare, and education, with a roadmap to cover all 22 scheduled Indian languages by 2026. It has firmly become a symbol of India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat vision — building AI that is sovereign, inclusive, and culturally rooted.
ORIGINAL NEWS STORY:
India Launches BharatGen: The First Government-Supported Multimodal Large Language Model Initiative
India marked a historic step in its advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) with the launch of BharatGen, a pioneering initiative in generative AI designed to revolutionize public service delivery and enhance citizen engagement. The initiative was inaugurated virtually by Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology, on October 3.
Dr. Singh praised BharatGen as a milestone for India’s technological self-reliance and a step towards global leadership in AI development. During the inauguration, Dr. Singh emphasized BharatGen’s significance, stating, “BharatGen is a proud example of India’s commitment to advancing homegrown technologies. It positions India as a global leader in the field of Generative AI, much like our achievements with UPI and other innovations that have transformed various sectors.”
BharatGen is notable with a focus on creating AI systems tailored to India’s unique linguistic and cultural landscape. Spearheaded by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), which operates under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the project aims to develop generative AI models that cater to India’s diverse languages and cultural contexts.
The implementation of BharatGen is being managed by the TIH Foundation for IOT and IOE at IIT Bombay, with academic collaboration from other prestigious institutions, including IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Madras. The team, led by Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT Bombay, is working to develop AI models that can generate high-quality text and multimodal content in Indian languages.
A key goal of BharatGen is to deliver AI models and applications as a public good, addressing India’s broader needs such as social equity, cultural preservation, and linguistic diversity. The project will prioritize ensuring that the benefits of AI reach all segments of society, especially those underserved by current global AI models. Professor Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the DST, highlighted this aspect, noting, “BharatGen is aligned with the goal of making AI accessible to all citizens, using AI not only for industrial and commercial purposes but also to address national priorities like cultural preservation and inclusive technology development.”
The initiative will cater to both text and speech in various Indian languages, capturing the nuances of these languages, many of which are underrepresented in global AI models. BharatGen is designed to train on multilingual datasets, making it more inclusive and culturally relevant for India’s diverse population. The project will also focus on building a dataset of India-centric data to enhance data sovereignty, ensuring that Indian narratives and dialects are accurately represented in AI technologies.
BharatGen aligns with India’s Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) initiative by reducing reliance on foreign technologies and fostering a domestic AI ecosystem. By developing foundational AI models within India, the initiative aims to strengthen the country’s AI capabilities and promote innovation across sectors, including startups, industries, and government agencies.
One of the core features of BharatGen is its focus on data-efficient learning, particularly for Indian languages that have limited digital presence. Through collaboration with academic institutions, BharatGen will develop models that are effective with minimal data, addressing a critical gap in AI development for underserved languages.
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