IIT Bombay’s decision to integrate the BharatGen Technology Foundation signals a major turning point for India’s AI ambitions. Rather than simply nurturing deep-tech entrepreneurs, the institute is now positioning itself at the core of India’s own AI infrastructure—anchoring the country’s first Large Language Model designed around its linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. This marks one of the most significant attempts yet to create sovereign AI capabilities rooted entirely in India’s data, dialects, and computational priorities.
BharatGen is being developed by a powerful consortium of institutions, including Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH), Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Management, Indore, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. The initiative has received a substantial Rs 235 crore grant from the Department of Science and Technology under NM-ICPS, along with an additional Rs 1,058 crore from MeitY as part of the IndiaAI Mission—making it one of the country’s most well-funded public AI programs.
Founder Director Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan emphasised that moving from research prototypes to real-world deployment requires “the autonomy of a corporation rather than an academic project.” He outlined how BharatGen is being architected to support more than 22 Indian languages and to operate across multiple modalities, including text, speech, and document vision. By training the models entirely on Indian data, he argued, these systems will become “more dependable, reflecting how Indians naturally speak, read, and interact.”
A central pillar of BharatGen’s strategy is accessibility. Prof Ramakrishnan highlighted that the foundation will release distilled versions of its models to Indian developers and companies. This is intended to democratise sovereign AI, enabling startups, legacy enterprises, and public institutions to build products without bearing the massive costs of training large-scale models from scratch. He described this approach as BharatGen “doing the heavy lifting so the country’s innovators can get straight to building.”
With BharatGen, IIT Bombay and its consortium partners are laying the groundwork for AI that is not just made in India, but fundamentally made for India—setting the stage for a new era of indigenous, culturally aligned, and publicly backed AI infrastructure.
