Artificial Intelligence will play a defining role in shaping India’s future ecosystem, said Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President of BharatGen. He emphasised that BharatGen’s mission is to build a sovereign and inclusive AI framework that reflects India’s unique linguistic and cultural diversity.
BharatGen, developed by the BharatGen Consortium, is India’s first government-backed multimodal large language model project. It is anchored under the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay and supported by the Department of Science and Technology through the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems. The initiative aims to design generative AI solutions tailored to India’s socio-cultural, industrial, and linguistic needs. The focus is on creating inclusive AI across 22 Indian languages by integrating text, speech, and images.
Bal explained that BharatGen is driven by three principles: sovereignty, Indianness, and accessibility. “Sovereignty to ensure that there is supply security and safety in AI that is being built and deployed in India. The second is Indianness, so that we can bring language, culture, and an Indian perspective to the models that we are building and actually embed in them. And the third is having accessibility, so ensuring that all people have access to this AI, regardless of the language dialect that they speak in or the particular area of interest that they have,” he said.
The company has already released a series of smaller models with fewer than 10 billion parameters, now available for public use. With support from the government’s AI Mission programme, BharatGen is preparing to scale up development. “AI works. So the AI Missions Program unlocks for us a completely new set of models that we can develop. We have already built a range of small models with fewer than 10 billion parameters, which are available to the public today. But what AI missions funding does is it allows us to build a significantly larger and more capable set of models,” Bal noted. He added that the next-generation models will be multimodal, capable of handling text, speech, and images simultaneously.
One of BharatGen’s most promising applications is in agriculture. Bal highlighted Krishi Saathi, a voice-enabled WhatsApp tool designed to help farmers with real-time, localised solutions. “A great example of the domain-specific work that we are doing is an application we built for farmers called Krishi Saathi… We embedded our intelligence into a WhatsApp phone number, so anybody can pick up a phone, go to WhatsApp and ask a question. And what we did is we made it voice enabled, so you can ask it questions in Hindi about the range of problems that you are having, and the application actually asks you questions back right there in WhatsApp, all through voice chat, so you do not need to type anything,” he explained. The platform also connects farmers with suppliers and helps them access subsidies by guiding them through form submissions.
Bal expressed gratitude for the government’s support under the India AI Mission, describing it as crucial for overcoming infrastructure barriers. “It is very computationally intensive… this fund allows us to get access to a significantly larger number of chips that we need to build this AI,” he said. He also noted that the funding will help BharatGen build domain-specific AI models in sectors such as law, finance, governance, and agriculture.
Importantly, Bal stressed that BharatGen is not just about technology but also about talent development. “These models that we are able to develop with this new round of funding will be embedded inside of different types of applications that citizens will use… The other thing that is very interesting about this round of funding… is that a lot of students from these academic institutes are also working with us… they are getting trained as well,” he said.
He concluded that the long-term vision is to establish India as a leader in AI innovation while nurturing the next generation of homegrown talent. “So not only are we creating the next generation of models, but we are also creating the next generation of homegrown talent who will build the next wave of India’s AI right here in India,” Bal added.
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