FAQ

BharatGen is India’s sovereign generative AI ecosystem focused on building multilingual, India-centric AI models and applications that understand the country’s languages, culture, and societal context. It is a fully government-funded initiative under the Department of Science & Technology (DST), supported through the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems and driven by a consortium of leading researchers and institutions across India.[bharatgen]​

BharatGen is designed from the ground up for India, prioritizing Indian languages, dialects, cultural nuances and local use cases rather than adapting a global model to the Indian context. Unlike most global platforms, it emphasizes data sovereignty, open ecosystems and collaboration with Indian government, academia, and industry to ensure AI solutions that reflect India’s values, regulatory environment and development priorities.[about bharatgen]​

Being a sovereign AI platform means BharatGen is aligned with India’s strategic priorities, data sovereignty goals, and long-term technological autonomy. It focuses on building and controlling core AI capabilities, datasets and infrastructure within the country, ensuring India retains ownership over critical models and the sensitive data used to train them.[bharatgen]​

BharatGen’s foundational text and speech models are being developed to support 22 or more Indian languages along with a wide range of regional dialects. The initiative also aims to cover underrepresented languages and speech varieties through Bharat Data Sagar, a large India-centric corpus that includes text and 15,000+ hours of annotated voice data across 22 Indian languages targeted by Q4 2025.[bharatgen text models]​

BharatGen is building AI solutions and models that power multilingual chatbots for governance, farmer advisory systems for agriculture and educational tools that work in Indian languages. Examples include Krishi Saathi for farm guidance, e‑VikrAI for e‑commerce sellers and domain-tuned text models that can be adapted for sectors such as finance, law and public services.[bharatgen krishi saathi]​

BharatGen is built as a government-supported, India-centric stack, and its design is aligned with India’s data sovereignty and regulatory priorities, which includes responsible handling of Indian data. Through Bharat Data Sagar and its partnerships, the initiative focuses on secure, versioned datasets and controlled access to models and data so that sensitive information is managed in line with national interests and institutional policies.[dst.gov]​

BharatGen intentionally trains its models on data that reflects India’s languages, culture, history, values and knowledge traditions, including Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). This ensures that AI outputs are not just linguistically correct but culturally grounded, capturing idioms, perspectives and contexts that resonate with Indian users in everyday and domain-specific scenarios.[about bharatgen]​

Bharat Data Sagar is BharatGen’s flagship data initiative to build the world’s largest India-focused dataset covering text, speech and images tied to Indian languages, culture, history and philosophy. This secure, versioned corpus is used to train foundational models for text, speech recognition, text-to-speech and other tasks so that AI systems can understand India’s linguistic and cultural diversity with high fidelity.[bharatgen]​

Param-1 is a BharatGen-developed foundation model (2.9B parameters) tailored to Indic languages, with capabilities in tasks such as conversation, comprehension and generation in English and Indian languages. Alongside Param and related text, ASR and TTS models, BharatGen is building a full stack of multilingual, multimodal models that can power chatbots, translation systems, voice assistants and domain-specific applications for sectors like agriculture, finance and law.[bharatgen param 1]​

BharatGen’s focus on Indian data, cultural context and responsible collaboration with public institutions helps reduce biases that arise from non-representative global datasets. The initiative also emphasizes compute-efficient training, Indian-context reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning, which enables better control over model behavior and supports ethical, inclusive AI aligned with Indian societal values.[about bharatgen]

BharatGen showcases multiple India-focused applications such as Krishi Saathi, an AI-powered farm bot with text-to-speech capabilities to guide and support farmers and e‑VikrAI, an AI assistant for Indian sellers that helps with product cataloging and business operations. In addition, BharatGen provides text models and other components like BharatGen Text-to-Speech that can be integrated into sector-specific solutions and third-party products.[bharatgen e-vikrai]​

BharatGen invites collaboration from startups, system integrators, government agencies, academic institutions and investors to co-create AI solutions. Partners can engage through data sharing, co-development of applications, integration of BharatGen models, ecosystem programs and joint research, leveraging BharatGen’s infrastructure guidance, AI resources and expertise.[bharatgen]​

Startups and developers can engage with BharatGen by leveraging its text models, speech technologies and datasets as these are progressively released through open-source channels and structured partnerships. BharatGen’s ecosystem also offers guidance, technical support and collaboration opportunities so builders can integrate India-centric AI into their own platforms and products.[bharatgen text models]

Yes, BharatGen plans to release a subset of its models, weights, training recipes and data as open source, starting with text and TTS models in 2025, while reserving advanced assets for government and trusted partners. The initiative is also developing benchmarks focused on Indian domains like education, agriculture and law so the broader community can evaluate and improve AI systems for Indian conditions.[bharatgen]​

BharatGen actively invests in talent development by sponsoring Master’s and PhD students, funding MTech/PhD researchers and supporting AI research at leading Indian institutes. It organizes workshops, conferences, hackathons, internships and AI courses, giving students and researchers hands-on opportunities to work with India-centric models and contribute to the national AI ecosystem.[about bharatgen]​

The Government of India, through the Department of Science & Technology, provides core funding, strategic direction and institutional backing to BharatGen as part of national AI and cyber-physical systems missions. DST leaders, including the Honorable Minister and senior officials, championed the proposal and rapidly approved and mobilized resources, recognizing the national importance of sovereign multilingual large language models.[pib.gov]​

BharatGen works with industry partners like IBM and others to accelerate AI deployment, co-develop solutions and ensure that its models can run efficiently on enterprise-grade infrastructure. These collaborations help take BharatGen’s multilingual, India-centric models into real-world applications across sectors, combining public research strengths with private-sector execution capabilities.[ibm and bharatgen partnership]​

BharatGen has a clear roadmap to deliver rolling releases of models with expanding support for Indian languages, modalities and domain-specific capabilities through Q4 2025 and beyond. The plan includes building state-of-the-art text, ASR, TTS and translation models for 22 Indian languages, expanding benchmarks and continuously improving inclusivity, performance and applicability across governance, agriculture, finance, law and education.[about bharatgen]​

Enterprises can approach BharatGen through its official website contact channels to explore pilots, integrations and custom AI solutions built on its sovereign models. Through its ecosystem and applications program, BharatGen offers partnership structures, infrastructure guidance and collaborative development pathways tailored to organizational needs.[contact us]​

Updates on BharatGen’s progress, summits, and new releases are shared on the official website and dedicated pages such as the BharatGen Summit, as well as through partner and media announcements. Stakeholders can also follow BharatGen’s broader ecosystem communications and announcements from government bodies and collaborators to stay informed about milestones and opportunities.[bharatgen events]​