BharatGen, India's national AI entity, receives the biggest portion of Rs. 1,500 crore under the IndiaAI mission, securing a substantial sum of Rs. 988.6 crore in funding.
BharatGen, a comprehensive suite of Generative AI technologies, is set to serve India's diverse socio-cultural, linguistic, and industrial needs. This project, anchored under the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH), IIT Bombay, is the nation's first government-funded initiative focused on developing inclusive and efficient AI across 22 Indian languages.
The project received financing from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the period 2017 to 2020. This allocation, amounting to 988.6 Crore over a year, will facilitate BharatGen's efforts to build Large Language Models (LLM) with up to 1 trillion parameters. The funding positions BharatGen as the foremost beneficiary of the Rs. 1,500 crore IndiaAI Mission 2025.
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Principal Investigator from IIT Bombay, stated that the allocation will empower BharatGen to advance its foundational models and ensure inclusive access across the country's diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President of BharatGen, commented that the landmark allocation by MeitY signals India's resolve to build sovereign AI at scale.
BharatGen launched Param-1, a bilingual LLM with 2.9 billion parameters, pretrained on 5 trillion tokens in English and Hindi. The project is now expanding to multilingual and multimodal AI systems across all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
The BharatGen consortium includes leading institutions such as IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, IIIT Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur. The funding will also boost the development of India-focused technologies like text-to-speech, speech recognition, and vision-language tools.
Prof Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), congratulated the BharatGen team on the support from India AI Mission for scaling the technology. Professor Kedare, Director of IIT Bombay, expressed happiness about hosting BharatGen as a National Sovereign AI Ecosystem.
Hon'ble Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, made the formal announcement at an event held in Delhi. Mr. Krishnan, Secretary of MeitY, expressed delight at BharatGen taking up the responsibility of developing a sovereign GenAI stack for India.
The AI models developed by BharatGen are expected to support real-world applications across key areas such as agriculture, governance, finance, healthcare, and education. The project's mission is to build a robust Gen AI ecosystem for India, integrating text, speech, and images to create robust AI solutions built for India's realities.
The funding from MeitY will aid BharatGen in its mission, empowering the project to advance its foundational models and ensure inclusive access across the country's diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. The allocation marks a significant step towards India's goal of building a sovereign AI at scale, addressing the country's unique needs and challenges.
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