New Delhi, 30 September 2024: BharatGen launched today as a government-funded initiative to build AI models for India, from the ground up. Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology, launched it with Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, and the consortium institutions.
Backed by the Department of Science and Technology
BharatGen is funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), with ₹235 crore. The funding is channelled through the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay, the TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE, which runs the project with its partner institutions.
A consortium, led by IIT Bombay
IIT Bombay leads the work, together with IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, IIIT Delhi, IIT Madras and IIT Kharagpur.
What we set out to build
Most AI models are trained largely on English and a few other widely used languages. They often break words in Indian languages into many small pieces, and they miss Indian context. BharatGen's goal is to change that, with:
- AI models trained from scratch for India, across text, speech and documents, in Indian languages.
- Benchmarks built on Indian knowledge, so that anyone can test how well a model understands India.
- Open models that startups, enterprises, governments and researchers can build on.
- Real applications from the start, tested with the people who will use them.
The plan runs over two years, from building the first AI models to taking them into use across industry and public services.
Since this post, BharatGen has released four families of open-weight AI models for text, speech and vision, and the IndiaAI Mission has added ₹1,058 crore of support. Read the story so far in Two years of BharatGen.
