BharatGen Marks Milestone in India’s Sovereign AI Journey: Dr Jitendra Singh

New Delhi, Feb 18 (KNN) Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology, Dr. Jitendra Singh, said that Artificial Intelligence has become an essential component across all spheres of activity, underscoring its growing integration into governance, industry and public services.

He was addressing the session titled “BharatGen Models: Vision and Technical Execution 2026” at Bharat Mandapam as part of the Global AI Summit.

The session was hosted by BharatGen in collaboration with the India AI Mission, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The Minister described BharatGen as India’s first government-owned sovereign multilingual and multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) initiative, designed to reflect the country’s socio-cultural and linguistic diversity.

Dr. Singh said the initiative represents a milestone in India’s efforts toward technological self-reliance.

He characterised BharatGen as a “whole-of-science, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” model, implemented through a consortium led by the TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay, with participation from institutions including IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIM Indore and IIT Madras.

The project is supported with Rs 235 crore under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) and further backed by an outlay of Rs 1,058 crore under the India AI Mission.

Highlighting the technological scope, the Minister noted that BharatGen encompasses text-based foundation models, speech technologies such as automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech systems, and document vision-language models.

These are intended for deployment in sectors including governance, healthcare, education, agriculture and legal services, particularly in linguistically diverse regions.

He stated that domain-specific models such as Ayur Param for Ayurveda, Agri Param for agriculture and Legal Param for the Indian legal ecosystem have already been released.

The Prime Minister has also launched BharatGen’s latest models, including Param-2, a 17-billion-parameter text foundation model covering 22 scheduled Indian languages, along with Shrutam speech-to-text models in 12 languages, Sooktam text-to-speech models in 12 languages, and Patram models under the DocBodh framework to enable multilingual access to complex Indian documents.

Dr. Singh emphasised that India’s linguistic landscape extends beyond the 22 scheduled languages and called for continued expansion of datasets to include widely spoken regional languages and dialects.

He said scientific and technological progress must align with real-world diversity, particularly in areas such as digital health and public service delivery.

The Minister also noted that BharatGen has transitioned into a Section-8 entity, the BharatGen Technology Foundation, to facilitate national-scale operations while maintaining data and model sovereignty through initiatives such as Bharat Data Sagar.

He stressed the need for collaborative approaches across government, academia and industry, stating that emerging technologies require coordinated efforts rather than siloed functioning.

The session featured technical presentations by BharatGen leadership and academic partners, alongside addresses by senior policymakers and technology experts.

An MoU exchange between BharatGen and the IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation was also conducted in the Minister’s presence.

Concluding his remarks, Dr. Jitendra Singh said BharatGen marks a new phase in India’s AI development, combining sovereign capability, institutional collaboration and inclusive design to strengthen the country’s national AI infrastructure in line with the vision of Viksit Bharat.

(KNN Bureau)