IIT Bombay launches non-profit AI company BharatGen to build India’s own LLMs and rival ChatGPT

IIT Bombay has launched its own AI company, BharatGen Technology Foundation, to build multilingual, culturally rooted artificial-intelligence tools for India. The company intends to build the nation's own large language model similar to global AI models like ChatGPT, that specifically caters to  Indian languages and people.

What is BharatGen Technology Foundation?

On November 7, BharatGen Technology Foundation was officially registered as a not-for-profit entity with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai, with its headquarters on the Powai campus.

With BharatGen, IIT Bombay wants to bridge academia and real-world deployment.

Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, who leads the foundation, said, "Creating a dedicated company gives the team the freedom and agility needed to move these massive models from ‘research mode’ to real-world use." 

BharatGen has secured substantial backing of around Rs. 1,293 crore. As reported by the Free Press Journal, the breakdown includes:

- Rs. 235 crore from the DST, allocated in 2024 to support the initial development of multilingual models.

- Rs. 1,058 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the IndiaAI Mission, announced in late 2025 to accelerate scaling and deployment.

IIT Bombay’s AI venture is a pan-India consortium that partners with top academic and research bodies to pool expertise. The partners include IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, and IIM Indore. 

The consortium also includes startups, industries, government agencies (eg, Bhashini for language tools), venture capitalists, and other IIITs for co-creation, data sharing, and AI skilling programs.

Key features of BharatGen

BharatGen is on a mission to build foundational generative AI (GenAI) models fluent in over 22 Indian languages, dialects, and cultural nuances.

It goes beyond translation to capture the 'Indian way' of communication by handling accents, idioms, and context-specific interactions. [Source: FPJ]

Multimodal Capabilities: Text understanding/generation, speech recognition/synthesis (including text-to-speech for accessibility), and document processing.

Bharat Data Sagar: The world's largest India-centric dataset repository, encompassing text, speech (15,000+ hours annotated across 22 languages by Q4 2025), and images rooted in Indian history, philosophy, and culture.

Specialised Applications: BharatGen will build tools like e-VikrAI (AI assistant for e-commerce sellers), Krishi Saathi (agri-bot with voice insights for farmers), and Patram - India’s first vision-language document AI model - that will be extremely beneficial to non-English speakers.

OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini rely on vast English-centric training data, often struggling with nuances and cultural subtleties in other languages.

Meanwhile, BharatGen directly challenges such global large language models (LLMs) by prioritising 'sovereign AI' that is authentically Indian, addressing gaps in inclusivity and relevance.

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