In a landmark move for India's technological sovereignty, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) has officially stepped into the corporate arena. The premier engineering institute has moved beyond incubating startups to establishing its own company, marking a strategic shift in how it plans to shape the nation's artificial intelligence future.
From Academic Project to Corporate Entity
On November 7, 2025, the BharatGen Technology Foundation was formally registered with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai. Unlike typical faculty-led ventures or incubated spinoffs, this is an organization wholly owned and anchored by IIT Bombay itself, using the institute's Powai address. This corporate structure, as explained by Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, the founder director of BharatGen, is crucial. "To take the models from the lab to market requires the functional freedom and autonomy of a corporation as opposed to being just an academic project," he stated.
The Vision for a Truly Indian AI
BharatGen represents India's pioneering attempt to build a Large Language Model (LLM) that authentically mirrors the country's vast linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. The project is designed to function across more than 22 Indian languages, combining text, speech, and document vision. The goal is to create AI systems that can interpret information the way Indian citizens naturally speak, read, and interact.
"BharatGen's ambition is not just to build large language models, but to build ones that sound and think like India," emphasized Prof. Ramakrishnan. The core strength of the initiative lies in training AI on home-grown datasets, an approach expected to make the technology far more dependable for real-world applications within the country.
Massive Funding and a National Consortium
The foundation for BharatGen was laid last year with an initial support of Rs 235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under its National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). The project has now received a significant boost, securing an additional Rs 1,058 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission. This brings the total committed funding to a substantial Rs 1,293 crore, transforming BharatGen into a full-fledged national sovereign AI effort.
Led by IIT Bombay, the project is a massive collaborative effort. The consortium includes several top-tier institutions:
- IIT Madras
- IIT Kanpur
- IIIT Hyderabad
- IIT Mandi
- IIT Hyderabad
- IIM Indore
- IIT Kharagpur
- IIIT Delhi
This model of operation is designed to democratize access to advanced AI. BharatGen plans to release distilled versions of its models to developers, enabling startups and enterprises to leverage sovereign AI capabilities without the prohibitive cost and expertise required to train such colossal systems independently. "BharatGen will do the heavy lifting so the country's innovators can get straight to building," Prof. Ramakrishnan added.
The establishment of BharatGen Technology Foundation by IIT Bombay is more than an institutional milestone; it is a clear declaration of India's intent to build its own foundational AI infrastructure. By creating a corporate vehicle for this sovereign AI mission, IIT Bombay is ensuring that the technology developed in its labs can effectively reach the market and empower a new generation of Indian innovation.
