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When Union Minister, Jitendra Singh sat down with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen team, the unveiling of India’s first sovereign multilingual, multimodal LLM, drove home the message: India intends to secure control of its digital foundations. The Minister underscored that the country’s AI capabilities must be built locally, governed locally, and rooted in India’s own languages and data.
The BharatGen team briefed the minister on how the model is being built to reflect India’s linguistic and cultural complexity, supporting more than 22 Indian languages and integrating text, speech and document-vision capabilities. That design choice ensures that national AI systems speak to India’s lived realities.
The initiative is backed by Rs 235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology through the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay under the NM-ICPS mission, and further expanded with Rs 1,058 crore from MeitY under the India AI Mission. This sustained investment underscores the government’s intention to create a fully sovereign AI stack, from foundational models to data infrastructure.
A major component, Bharat Data Sagar, aims to ensure complete national ownership of India-centric datasets, an approach that carries long-term implications for digital autonomy. The team presented models developed so far, including Param-1, Shrutam, Sooktam and Patram, forming a comprehensive AI suite capable of supporting sectors ranging from agriculture to governance.
Demonstrations of early applications, such as Krishi Sathi for farmers, e-VikrAI for small sellers and Docbodh for document understanding, highlighted how such tools could expand digital inclusion and strengthen last-mile service delivery. Singh noted that these examples illustrate why sovereign AI must be rooted in local context, especially in a country defined by linguistic and regional diversity.
Industry partnerships with IBM, Zoho, NASSCOM, central ministries, and states like Maharashtra further position BharatGen as a collaborative national ecosystem rather than a stand-alone research project. Singh emphasized that India’s broader technological priorities, whether in AI, quantum, space or cyber-physical systems, now hinge on similar public-private alignment.
In Singh’s view, BharatGen represents a turning point: a move from being a user of global AI technologies to shaping systems uniquely tailored for 1.4 billion Indians. As India pursues leadership in frontier technologies, BharatGen signals that the country’s digital future will increasingly be built on models that are globally benchmarked yet fundamentally Indian.
