The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay has unveiled BharatGen, a local AI venture designed to help Indians comprehend and use multiple languages. This initiative was announced during Bharat Innovates 2026, held in Nice, France from June 14 to 16. BharatGen aims to develop AI solutions for communication, analysis, and content creation in various Indian languages.
BharatGen: A Consortium of Leading Institutions
Led by Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, BharatGen brings together a consortium of nine leading academic institutions. A team of over 60 researchers, engineers, and linguists is working to build AI models covering all 22 scheduled Indian languages across text, speech, and document-based applications.
Key AI Models of BharatGen
Param2 is the foundational AI model of BharatGen, capable of reasoning, coding, and calling various tools. It has been trained to work in all scheduled Indian languages, enabling users to interact with AI in their preferred language.
Shrutam2 converts spoken Indian languages into text format, while Sooktam2 handles text-to-speech technology with a zero-shot voice cloning facility. Patram is a document vision model designed to understand Indian-specific documents, supporting applications that require reading and processing regional documents.
Applications in Governance, Education, and Healthcare
BharatGen's developers believe AI must move beyond limited language access and become useful for everyday needs. The initiative targets sectors such as governance, healthcare, education, insurance, finance, and cultural preservation. By focusing on India's linguistic diversity, BharatGen aims to address a major challenge in digital inclusion, ensuring that people can access technology without language barriers.
India's Push Towards Homegrown AI
With support from the Department of Science and Technology and the IndiaAI Mission, BharatGen represents India's effort to improve its AI ecosystem indigenously. In an age of global AI innovation, BharatGen considers India's socio-cultural and linguistic context, aiming to develop AI for its 1.4 billion population while enriching the global AI debate.
