BharatGen Gets ₹988 Crore to Build India’s Sovereign AI Stack
The announcement was made by Union Minister of Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw
BharatGen, India’s pioneering government-backed multimodal Sovereign AI initiative, has been allocated Rs. 988.6 crore by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), making it the largest beneficiary of the Rs. 1,500 crore IndiaAI Mission 2025. The announcement was made by Union Minister of Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, during an event at Hotel The Ashok in New Delhi, underscoring BharatGen’s pivotal role in shaping India’s sovereign AI ecosystem.
The substantial funding will empower BharatGen to develop advanced AI models, including Large Language and Multimodal Models with up to one trillion parameters, alongside specialized smaller models. The initiative will focus on India-centric technologies such as text-to-speech, speech recognition, and vision-language tools, with applications spanning agriculture, governance, finance, healthcare, and education. These models will be trained on state-of-the-art supercomputing clusters, with resources allocated to meet additional infrastructural needs.
Earlier this year, BharatGen launched Param-1, a bilingual Large Language Model with 2.9 billion parameters, pretrained on 5 trillion tokens in English and Hindi. The next phase will expand to multilingual and multimodal AI systems covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages, ensuring inclusive access across India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. The BharatGen consortium, comprising leading institutions like IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, IIIT Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur, strengthens its collaborative foundation.
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Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Principal Investigator at IIT Bombay, expressed enthusiasm, stating, “The allocation will empower BharatGen to advance its foundational models, strengthen India’s AI infrastructure, drive enterprise adoption, and enable developers through our Sovereign AI stack.” Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President of BharatGen, added, “This landmark allocation signals India’s resolve to build sovereign AI at scale, reflecting the diversity of our nation while advancing India’s leadership in the global technology landscape.”
Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), congratulated the BharatGen team, noting, “It’s truly inspiring to witness the remarkable scale and speed of their progress. With this ‘whole of government’ approach, BharatGen is poised for an even brighter future.” Professor Kedare, Director of IIT Bombay, highlighted the institute’s pride in hosting BharatGen, crediting the leadership of Prof. Ramakrishnan and Mr. Bal for positioning IIT Bombay at the forefront of India’s AI journey.
MeitY Secretary Mr. Krishnan emphasized the initiative’s significance, stating, “BharatGen is taking on the crucial responsibility of developing a sovereign GenAI stack for our nation. This unique consortium bridges academic research and downstream applications, and we look forward to Team BharatGen making a mark globally.” Led by Rishi Bal and Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, BharatGen combines academic rigor with enterprise-scale execution.
BharatGen, anchored under IIT Bombay’s Technology Innovation Hub and supported by the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, is India’s first government-funded Multimodal Large Language Model project. By integrating text, speech, and images across 22 Indian languages, BharatGen aims to deliver inclusive and efficient AI solutions tailored to India’s socio-cultural and industrial needs, positioning the nation as a global leader in AI innovation.
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