What is BharatGen?

BharatGen, India’s first-of-its-kind indigenously developed, government-funded, Artificial Intelligence (AI)–based Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for Indian languages, has been developed to strengthen the country’s sovereign AI capabilities.

The initiative has been taken up under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) and is being implemented through the TIH Foundation for Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE) at IIT Bombay. It is supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and brings together a consortium of leading academic institutions, domain experts, and innovators.

BharatGen is the first government-supported national initiative aimed at developing a suite of sovereign foundational AI models tailored specifically to Indian languages and societal contexts. The platform is multimodal, covering:

• Text (through Large Language Models),
• Speech (Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition), and
• Vision-language systems.

At present, BharatGen’s AI models support 15 Indian languages—Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, and Telugu. The initiative aims to expand coverage to all 22 scheduled Indian languages in the near future.