New Delhi: BharatGen, India’s first government-backed multimodal sovereign AI initiative, has been allocated ₹988.6 crore under the IndiaAI Mission 2025, emerging as the largest recipient of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) ₹1,500 crore allocation.
The announcement was made by Union Minister of Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, at Hotel The Ashok, New Delhi, marking a significant step in advancing India’s sovereign artificial intelligence ecosystem.
BharatGen: The Largest Beneficiary of IndiaAI Mission
The allocation positions BharatGen as the flagship project of the IndiaAI Mission, tasked with building advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal AI systems with parameters scaling up to one trillion.
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The initiative will also develop smaller, domain-specific AI models and India-centric technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech, and vision-language tools.
The AI models will be trained on advanced supercomputing clusters and are expected to drive applications across agriculture, healthcare, finance, governance, and education, contributing to India’s digital transformation.
Progress and Consortium
Earlier this year, BharatGen unveiled Param-1, a bilingual LLM with 2.9 billion parameters trained on 5 trillion tokens in Hindi and English. The next development phase will expand into multilingual and multimodal AI systems covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages, ensuring equitable AI access nationwide.
The BharatGen consortium brings together top institutions including IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kharagpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Delhi, and IIM Indore, strengthening its academic and research backbone.
Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan (IIT Bombay, Principal Investigator) stated that the funding will help strengthen India’s AI infrastructure, empower developers, and enable enterprises while ensuring inclusivity across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts.
Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President of BharatGen, called the allocation a landmark decision, emphasizing that BharatGen is laying the foundation of a sovereign AI ecosystem reflecting India’s diversity while advancing its global technology leadership.
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Prof Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, DST, congratulated the BharatGen team, highlighting the government’s whole-of-nation approach in scaling sovereign AI.
Mr. Krishnan, Secretary, MeitY, said the initiative sets a strong precedent for bridging academic research with downstream applications, reinforcing India’s resolve to build sovereign AI at scale.
About BharatGen
BharatGen is a pioneering initiative under the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH), IIT Bombay, supported by the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.
As the country’s first government-funded multimodal LLM initiative, BharatGen is developing Generative AI solutions across 22 Indian languages, integrating text, speech, and vision technologies to deliver inclusive and efficient AI built for India’s diverse socio-cultural and industrial needs.
