What They Build
BharatGen is an open-source, open-weights AI initiative led by IIT Bombay through the BharatGen Technology Foundation, building multilingual and multimodal models for Indian languages and domains across text, speech, images, and documents.
Why They Matter
India's AI infrastructure question is whether the country can own data, training pipelines, and model weights for its own languages and public domains. BharatGen matters because it is a major public research and deployment effort aimed at that layer. The challenge is turning grant-backed model development into tools that developers and institutions actually use.
Founders
Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Rishi Bal
Recent Milestones
- BharatGen consortium launched under IIT Bombay with Department of Science and Technology backing
- Param-1 bilingual LLM launched in May 2025
- Rs 989 crore IndiaAI Mission allocation announced in September 2025; total government support since stated at over Rs 1,235 crore
- BharatGen Technology Foundation incorporated as a Section 8 company in November 2025
- Param 2, a 17B-parameter mixture-of-experts model covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages, launched in February 2026
- Five-year MoU signed with L&T Semiconductor Technologies and L&T-Vyoma in April 2026 for a sovereign AI compute platform; named a founding contributor to the AI Alliance's Project Tapestry in June 2026