Excelsior Correspondent
MUMBAI, Nov 25: Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science & Technology; Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Earth Sciences; MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr. Jitendra Singh today hailed “BharatGen” as India’s first sovereign multilingual and multimodal AI driven Large Language Model , during his visit to IIT Bombay.
The Minister interacted with the core team of “BharatGen”, reviewed the ongoing work under the project and also received an extensive presentation.
During the briefing, Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Professor-in-Charge of BharatGen, explained in detail how the model functions, what it seeks to achieve, and how it is being developed as a national AI asset for the future. The presentation was attended by Prof. Shireesh Kedare, Director, IIT Bombay; Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary, Department of Science and Technology; and Prof. Kasturi Saha from the Quantum Sensing & Metrology Hub, along with members of the BharatGen team.
Dr. Jitendra Singh was briefed that BharatGen is India’s first sovereign effort to create a Large Language Model that truly reflects the linguistic, cultural and social diversity of the nation. Built to support over twenty-two Indian languages, BharatGen integrates three major modalities- text, speech and document vision, so that it can understand, generate and interpret information in the same way Indian citizens naturally communicate. The Minister was told that this mission has been conceived in the spirit of building an inclusive digital future, where every Indian language, dialect and regional context is represented in the country’s AI capabilities. The project aligns with the broader national vision of making India a global leader in frontier technologies, an objective consistently emphasised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has repeatedly called for developing technology that is rooted in India’s strengths, addresses India’s needs, and contributes to the world from an Indian lens.
The presentation highlighted that BharatGen is supported under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) of the Department of Science and Technology, with Rs 235 crore being channelled through the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay. The consortium, led by IIT Bombay, includes leading institutions such as IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, IIT Kharagpur and IIIT Delhi. Dr. Singh noted that the coming together of such institutions signals a new era of collaborative, mission-driven research, and reflects India’s growing strength in deep-tech innovation.
The Minister reviewed the BharatGen models released so far. The team presented Param-1, a foundational text model of 2.9 billion parameters trained on 7.5 trillion tokens, with over one-third of the training data representing Indian content. BharatGen has also built Speech models such as Shrutam, a 30-million-parameter Automatic Speech Recognition system, and Sooktam, a 150-million-parameter Text-to-Speech model available in nine Indic languages. Additionally, the project has delivered Patram, India’s first document-vision model with seven billion parameters, trained on 2.5 billion tokens, designed to understand and interpret complex documents in Indian formats. Dr. Singh appreciated that these models together create a complete AI stack for India- text, speech and vision, capable of supporting governance, industry, education, agriculture, healthcare and digital inclusion.
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