IIT Bombay Launches BharatGen: India's Strategic Push for Indigenous LLMs in 22 Languages

The BharatGen Technology Foundation was launched on November 7, 2025, at the Powai campus of IIT Bombay to develop indigenous LLMs that can cater to over 22 official languages, diverse accents, and scripts with their respective cultural nuances. This will be backed by over Rs 1,293 crore contributed by various government ministries. 

Part of the IndiaAI Mission, the effort builds on a sovereign AI ecosystem in order to reduce dependence on foreign models and allow scalable applications for startups and enterprises. BharatGen is, hence, a strategic push toward linguistic inclusivity in AI, fostering innovations in text and speech generations across India's multilingual landscape.

Establishment and Objectives

BharatGen Technology Foundation was formally registered on November 7, 2025, expanding the scope of IIT Bombay from academia to national AI leadership. Its core mission is to create LLMs that process and generate content in more than 22 Indian languages, capturing the regional patterns of communication for authenticity in interactions. By prioritizing sovereignty, the project addresses gaps in global AI tools that often underperform on Indic languages, deploying models for education, healthcare, governance, and commerce.

This foundation forms the hub for collaborative R&D wherein the prototypes are transitioned to production-grade systems aligned with India's digital public infrastructure.

Government Funding and Support

The DST sanctioned Rs 235 crore, while MeitY committed Rs 1,058 crore through the IndiaAI Mission, amounting to significant seed capital for model training and infrastructure. This will facilitate high-compute resources, dataset curation in Indic languages, and ethical AI safeguards. Backing this ambition only highlights India's credo for self-reliant tech under programs such as Digital India, where BharatGen has emerged as a bedrock of the National AI Strategy.

Academic and Industry Collaborations 

BharatGen works through a consortium of premier institutions that pool in expertise on machine learning, linguistics, and natural language processing. Key recent innovation involves releasing "distilled" lightweight model versions, optimized for low-resource devices so as to empower startups, researchers, and SMEs without massive GPU needs. It democratizes access to encourage ecosystem-wide adoption for applications in regional languages, voice assistants, and content tools. 

Strategic Vision and Impact 

BharatGen aims at a national AI backbone that coalesces with platforms like UPI and Aadhaar, powering culturally sensitive applications from vernacular search engines to AI tutors. It addresses data sparsity in low-resource languages, hence promoting equity, boosting GDP due to AI-driven productivity, and enhancing global competitiveness. This initiative, over the long term, may be able to spawn open-sourced Indic AI datasets, fostering a vibrant developer community, and positioning India as an AI exporter.