BharatGen, India’s first government-backed multimodal sovereign AI flagship initiative, has received over ₹900 crore in funding from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), making it the largest single fund allocation under the IndiaAI Mission. The investment underscores the government’s ambition to position BharatGen at the forefront of building India’s sovereign AI capabilities.
Union Minister for Electronics & IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced the funding, emphasizing the government’s focus on nurturing a robust AI ecosystem. “This significant funding demonstrates India’s commitment to developing cutting-edge AI technologies that are indigenous, secure, and aligned with national priorities,” he stated.
BharatGen is being spearheaded by Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President, alongside Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay, bringing together expertise from both industry and academia. The initiative has already made significant strides, including the development of Param-1, a bilingual Large Language Model (LLM) with 2.9 billion parameters trained on 5 trillion tokens in English and Hindi.
Looking ahead, BharatGen aims to create multilingual and multimodal AI systems encompassing all 22 scheduled Indian languages, integrating text, speech, and image modalities. These efforts are designed to make AI tools more inclusive, context-aware, and applicable across diverse sectors of the Indian economy.
The project is being developed by a consortium led by IIT Bombay, with collaborative contributions from IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Mandi, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Hyderabad, and IIM Indore. The allocated funds will help accelerate the development of foundational AI models, enhance AI infrastructure, and promote the adoption of advanced AI technologies across enterprises, developers, and researchers in India.
BharatGen’s ambitious roadmap reflects India’s drive to establish self-reliant AI capabilities, ensuring the country remains competitive in a rapidly evolving global AI landscape. By leveraging multilingual and multimodal models, BharatGen is poised to support a broad spectrum of applications—from enterprise AI solutions to national-level digital initiatives—while reinforcing India’s position as a leader in the sovereign AI space.
