UPDATE — AUGUST 2025: Since its launch, BharatGen has evolved from a research initiative into India’s flagship sovereign generative AI project. Also 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. It mirrors 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 work on low-resource languages, including Santali 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.
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.
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 national initiative designed to transform public service delivery and strengthen digital self-reliance. Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology, unveiled the program virtually on October 3.
Building Homegrown AI for India
Dr. Singh described BharatGen as a milestone that showcases India’s push toward sovereign AI development. “BharatGen is a proud example of India’s commitment to advancing homegrown technologies,” he said. “It positions India as a global leader in the field of Generative AI, much like our achievements with UPI.” BharatGen will focus on creating generative AI systems that reflect India’s linguistic and cultural diversity. Led by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), the project aims to build models that understand Indian languages and cultural context.
A Collaborative Research Effort
The TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay manages the implementation. The effort includes collaboration from IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Madras. The research team, led by Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, is creating language models that generate high-quality text and multimodal content. Their goal is not only innovation — it is accessibility.
AI as a Public Digital Good
A core mission of BharatGen is to make AI available as a public good, similar to how India built UPI and Aadhaar for digital inclusion. The project prioritizes social equity, cultural preservation, and support for underserved communities. Professor Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, explained that the initiative pushes beyond commercial benefit: “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.”
Strengthening Data Sovereignty
BharatGen trains on multilingual datasets, capturing regional language nuances — including languages that global models rarely support. By building models on India-centered datasets, the initiative ensures that India retains control over its data and its digital future. The project also emphasizes data-efficient learning, an approach that enables accurate AI outcomes even when digital data is limited. This method is essential for helping India scale AI across low-resource languages.
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