India Launches BharatGen: World's First Government-Funded Multimodal LLM Initiative

With assistance from academic partners including IIT Bombay, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIT Madras, BharatGen aims to address the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of India

India launched BharatGen, an innovative generative AI project, on September 30, 2024, with the goal of improving citizen engagement and public service delivery. Building foundational models for computer vision, speech, and language is the aim of the government-funded project BharatGen, which is the world's first multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) initiative.

Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology, inaugurated the program in Delhi, highlighting its ability to position India as a global leader in AI, comparable to UPI's success. Led by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the project focuses on establishing high-quality generative AI systems in several Indian languages. With assistance from academic partners including IIT Bombay, IIIT Hyderabad, and IIT Madras, BharatGen aims to address the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of India. In addition, social justice, cultural preservation, and inclusive technology development will be given top priority under the initiative.

BharatGen's multilingual, multimodal foundation models and focus on building AI systems using India-centric datasets are two of its key features. By improving India's native AI ecosystem and reducing dependence on foreign technologies, this project is in line with the objectives of Atmanirbhar Bharat.
Expected to be completed by 2026, BharatGen will support AI innovation in the public, commercial, and educational fields, encouraging digital transformation in India.