Excelsior Correspondent
NEW DELHI, Feb 17: Lauding India’s first government owned, sovereign “Large Language Model”, Multilingual AI stack, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science & Technology; Earth Sciences; and Minister of State for PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Department of Atomic Energy and Department of Space, Dr. Jitendra Singh today said that Artificial Intelligence is no longer an option but an essential component of working in every sphere of life, as he addressed the session on “BharatGen Models: Vision and Technical Execution 2026” at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi and lauded.
The session was hosted by BharatGen in association with the IndiaAI Mission, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), as part of the Global AI Summit.
Congratulating the BharatGen team, the Minister said the initiative represents a significant milestone in India’s journey towards technological self-reliance. He underlined that BharatGen stands out as a government-owned sovereign multilingual and multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) initiative, tailored to India’s socio-cultural context and linguistic diversity. While large language models are known globally, he noted that BharatGen’s distinct feature lies in its sovereign, government-supported character, reflecting a proactive policy approach at an early stage of technological evolution.
Union Minister observed that BharatGen exemplifies a “whole-of-science, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” model. The initiative is implemented through a consortium led by the TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay, with partner institutions including IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIM Indore and IIT Madras. It is supported by DST through the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) with Rs 235 crore of funding, and further strengthened through the IndiaAI Mission of MeitY with an outlay of Rs 10,585 crore.
Highlighting the technological depth of the project, the Minister noted that BharatGen spans multiple AI modalities, including text-based large language models, speech technologies such as text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition, and document vision-language models. He stated that BharatGen’s foundational models are designed for inclusive, India-centric applications in governance, healthcare, education, agriculture and legal systems, especially in linguistically diverse regions.
Referring to recent developments, Dr. Jitendra Singh said that BharatGen has already released domain-specific fine-tuned models such as Ayur Param for Ayurveda, Agri Param for agriculture and Legal Param for the Indian legal domain. He further noted that the Hon’ble Prime Minister launched BharatGen’s latest models, including the Param-2 text foundation model in 22 scheduled Indian languages with 17 billion parameters, Shrutam speech-to-text models in 12 Indian languages, Sooktam text-to-speech models in 12 languages, and Patram models under the DocBodh framework for multilingual access to complex Indian documents.
The session also featured presentations by Rishi Bal, CEO BharatGen; Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Principal Investigator, IIT Bombay; Prof. S. Ravi Kiran, IIIT Hyderabad; and Dr. Amol Gite, Vice President, BharatGen, who outlined the ecosystem, data journey, deployment-ready platforms and sectoral partnerships. Addresses were delivered by Dr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, Chairman, NMICPS; S. Krishnan, Secretary MeitY; Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary DST; and Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser. An MoU exchange between BharatGen and the IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation also took place in the presence of the Minister.
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