BharatGen CEO On Why Models Alone Can’t Help India Gain In The AI Race

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With many homegrown foundation model initiatives competing for talent, compute and enterprise mindshare, the question of who will define the country’s AI future is becoming increasingly consequential.

Enter BharatGen. Launched as a non-profit consortium anchored at IIT Bombay and backed by the Department of Science and Technology, BharatGen is not your typical AI startup.

With ₹988.6 Cr in funding from the IndiaAI Mission — the largest single allocation under the government’s ₹1,500 Cr AI push — it is building multilingual and multimodal AI models across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Its model families — Param, Patram, Sooktam and Shrutam — span text, vision and speech, and its open-source releases have already crossed 1 lakh downloads.

But unlike for-profit challengers such as Sarvam AI or Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus, BharatGen operates as a non-profit with a mission that extends beyond model releases. 

In the last 18 months, BharatGen has published over 30 research papers and placed 100-plus interns across academia and industry. Today, the company is building what it calls the “Bharat Data Sagar”, a dataset repository aimed at capturing India’s linguistic and cultural diversity at scale.

In the last 18 months, BharatGen has published over 30 research papers and placed 100-plus interns across academia and industry. Today, the company is building what it calls the “Bharat Data Sagar”, a dataset repository aimed at capturing India’s linguistic and cultural diversity at scale.

In an interaction with Inc42, BharatGen CEO Rishi Bal laid out the organisation’s roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months. He........

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