India has taken a significant leap in its quest for AI self-reliance with the government approving ₹988.6 crore in funding for BharatGen, a consortium led by IIT Bombay, to develop a groundbreaking trillion-parameter multilingual AI model. This move, part of the flagship IndiaAI Mission, underscores the country’s commitment to building advanced, sovereign AI technologies that cater specifically to India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape, while positioning the nation as a global player in artificial intelligence innovation.
Announced by Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, the funding marks the largest allocation under the IndiaAI Innovation Centre’s mandate to foster cutting-edge AI development across the country.
“With BharatGen, India is building its sovereign AI capabilities to serve our linguistic, cultural, and governance needs at a global scale,” said Vaishnaw.
BharatGen is among eight organisations chosen by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to develop large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI systems under the flagship initiatives of the IndiaAI Mission. The selected entities—IIT Bombay Consortium (BharatGen), Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, Avataar AI, Zeinteiq Aitech Innovations, Genloop Intelligence, NeuroDX (Intellihealth), and Shodh AI—will be responsible for creating foundational AI models aimed at driving innovation across critical sectors such as governance, education, healthcare, agriculture, and more.
BharatGen aims to build one of the world’s largest AI models — with over one trillion parameters — alongside smaller, domain-specific and language-inclusive models tailored to India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. These tools will also support speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and vision-language applications for low-resource Indian languages.
To support the development of such large-scale models, the government is also investing in public compute infrastructure, including GPU clusters and high-performance cloud access. Additionally, a responsible AI governance framework is being formulated jointly by MeitY and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to ensure safe and ethical deployment of AI systems.
The announcement follows previous rounds of IndiaAI funding, which saw startups like Sarvam AI, SoketAI, Gnani.ai, and Gan AI selected to build models focused on specific domains and regional languages.
With BharatGen and the broader IndiaAI Mission, India is taking a strategic leap toward building a self-reliant AI ecosystem, blending open innovation, academic leadership, and private sector expertise.
Also Read: Hind Rectifiers Strengthens European Presence with BeLink Solutions Acquisition