Amid growing global discussions around AI access and technology sovereignty, India has unveiled BharatGen, a homegrown multilingual AI initiative designed to strengthen the country’s position in the evolving artificial intelligence landscape.
The announcement was made by IIT Bombay at the Bharat Innovates 2026 event in Nice, France, shortly after reports emerged that US authorities had asked AI startup Anthropic to restrict access to some of its most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos, for foreign nationals. The development has renewed conversations around the need for independent AI capabilities across countries.
Built specifically for India, BharatGen is an open family of AI models capable of understanding and generating content across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. The initiative aims to reduce dependence on foreign AI systems while addressing India’s unique linguistic diversity.
Supported by the IndiaAI Mission, a government-backed programme valued at approximately $1.2 billion, BharatGen is among the key outcomes of India’s effort to build publicly accessible AI models through subsidised computing resources.
The project goes beyond a traditional chatbot. Its core model, Param2, is designed for reasoning, coding and tool usage across Indian languages. The BharatGen suite also includes Shrutam2, a multilingual speech-to-text model, and Sooktam2, a text-to-speech system capable of zero-shot voice cloning after analysing a short voice sample.
Another model, Patram, has been developed to understand documents and forms commonly used in India, making it relevant for sectors such as banking, insurance and government services.
According to IIT Bombay, BharatGen is already being explored for applications in governance, healthcare, education, finance, insurance and cultural preservation.
The initiative is led by Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, along with CEO Rishi Bal and Vice President (Machine Learning) Dr. Maneesh Singh. More than 60 researchers, engineers and linguists from a consortium of 9 leading academic institutions are contributing to the project.
BharatGen’s launch has also intensified discussions around India’s AI future, with industry leaders debating who will drive the country’s next generation of AI innovation as traditional IT services firms continue to focus on their existing business priorities.
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