Pioneering India’s First
Sovereign AI Inclusive AI Ecosystem
BharatGen was born out of a vision to create a future where cutting-edge artificial intelligence, deeply rooted in India’s values, culture, history, languages, and heritage, empowers every Indian to connect, communicate, and innovate effortlessly. As a fully government-funded initiative under the Department of Science & Technology (DST), BharatGen is driving the creation of an inclusive and open AI ecosystem in India, aligned with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision for indigenous Large Language Model (LLM) development.
The Genesis of BharatGen
The journey of BharatGen began with a recognition of the national importance of developing sovereign AI models that truly represent India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. While 2+ billion parameter text models for Hindi and English languages had already been developed, there was a pressing need to create models that catered to the broader Indian context. Recognizing this gap, a detailed proposal was presented to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) of the Government of India. The leadership at DST, including Honorable Minister Shri Jitendra Singh and Secretary Prof. Abhay Karandikar, immediately championed this ambitious goal. Demonstrating exceptional commitment, DST swiftly mobilized initial funding for the initiative, which was formally approved in July 2024.
BharatGen officially launched in October 2024 with a core founding team. In the months that followed, the team made significant progress, rapidly building foundational models, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. These models were designed to be inclusive, encompassing all Indian languages and dialects, and built with India’s culture, history, values, and perspectives in mind.
Our Mission & Vision
BharatGen envisions a future where AI is not just a tool but a bridge that connects every Indian to the digital world, regardless of language or region. Our mission is to develop and deploy advanced AI solutions, grounded in India’s languages and cultural context, to create intuitive and accessible technology that empowers all Indians to safely connect, communicate, and build a brighter future.
Inclusive
Encompassing all Indian languages and dialects to ensure broad accessibility and representation for all citizens.
Open
Committed to transparency and collaboration by making research, models, and innovations accessible for public, private, and institutional benefit.
Indian
Built with not just language but culture, history, values, and perspective in mind.
Accessible
Designed to serve the needs of all citizens, from everyday uses to specialized areas such as healthcare, agriculture, cybersecurity, and education.
Sovereign
Aligned with India's strategic priorities and data sovereignty, ensuring full autonomy over the nation's technological future.
Building India-Centric AI Models
One of the key challenges in building foundational AI models that truly represent India is the lack of high-quality, diverse, and multi-lingual data. Existing datasets do not fully capture India’s rich cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic diversity. To address this, BharatGen has been working in collaboration with government institutions and partners to collect Indian data that is more broadly representative. We are also leveraging data augmentation techniques and exploring innovative methods to enhance the quality and diversity of our datasets.
On the technical side, BharatGen has been extensively exploring compute-efficient models, leveraging principles from flow matching, prosodic feature extraction (for speech), and integrating techniques such as distillation, task vectors, and mixtures of experts (for text). Additionally, we have been exploring Indian-context reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ensure that our models are not just technically advanced but also inclusive and truly representative of India.
Collaborating for Impact
BharatGen is collaborating with partners across key sectors to explore impactful applications of our AI models. For instance, in agriculture, we are exploring use cases to provide farmers with localized, AI-powered advisory services on yield and pest management, tailored to regional Indian languages. In governance, we are looking at solutions to improve citizen access to information and streamline public service delivery through multilingual chatbots. And in the finance sector, we are working on models to enhance financial inclusion by providing personalized financial literacy resources to underserved populations.
A Vibrant AI Ecosystem
BharatGen is committed to fostering a vibrant AI ecosystem in India. We see ourselves playing a key role in providing foundational models and resources that startups and system integrators can build upon. As explicitly mentioned by Prof. Abhay Karandikar, BharatGen’s AI development is aligned with national priorities, ensuring impactful applications across governance, agriculture, legal, and education with a custom-built, India-centric AI stack.
In addition to our technical contributions, BharatGen is actively investing in talent development. We are sponsoring Master’s and PhD students at top institutes in India, organizing workshops, conferences, and hackathons, and providing internship opportunities to researchers and students. Our goal is to help India become a leading producer of AI, not just a consumer.
Looking Ahead
BharatGen is progressing rapidly, with a clear roadmap for the development and deployment of our AI models. We are targeting rolling releases in the coming months, with a focus on creating models that are not just technically advanced but also inclusive and representative of India’s diversity. Our work is guided by a commitment to transparency, collaboration, and innovation, ensuring that BharatGen remains at the forefront of India’s AI revolution.
As we continue to build and refine our models, we invite you to join us on this journey. Together, we can create a future where AI empowers every Indian, bridging the digital divide and unlocking new opportunities for growth and innovation.
The Innovators
Rishi Bal
Rishi Bal
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Our Team
The strength of BharatGen lies in the diversity and depth of its people—an interdisciplinary team that brings together expertise across artificial intelligence, language technologies, and project execution. Our team reflects the robust foundation needed to deliver a national-scale initiative rooted in innovation, inclusion, and impact.
AI & ML Engineers
Our AI and ML engineers are at the heart of BharatGen’s technological development. Specializing in machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, they design the core algorithms powering our multi-modal large language models (LLMs). This group includes postdoctoral researchers and technical experts from consortium institutions who ensure that the models are accurate, scalable, and reflective of India’s linguistic diversity.
Researchers
Comprising faculty members, PhD scholars, and research associates, our researchers fuel innovation within BharatGen. Working under the mentorship of leading professors, they explore novel methodologies to make generative AI more inclusive, efficient, and adaptable to India’s unique socio-linguistic context.
Project Managers
To coordinate a multi-institutional initiative of this magnitude, our project managers play a pivotal role. They oversee research, development, and deployment timelines, ensuring alignment with BharatGen’s mission and objectives. Their work bridges academia, industry, and government, enabling seamless collaboration across stakeholders and partner ecosystems.
Trainers
Our trainers are the champions of community engagement and knowledge dissemination. They focus on democratizing access to BharatGen’s technologies by conducting hands-on workshops, developing user-friendly training material, and supporting outreach programs such as fellowships and hackathons. Their efforts help build the capacity needed for widespread AI adoption across the country.
Careers
At BharatGen, we’re pioneering the development of inclusive, multimodal large language models that resonate with India’s linguistic and cultural diversity. Supported by the Department of Science & Technology under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, our mission is to create AI technologies that empower every Indian.