Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh launched ‘BharatGen’, India’s first indigenously developed Government funded AI based Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for Indian Languages at the IndiaGen Summit in New Delhi.

About BharatGen
- Introduction: It is India’s first indigenously developed Government funded Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for Indian Languages.
- BharatGen Mission is a national initiative funded by the Government of India to indigenously develop a multimodal, multilingual, and culturally relevant Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Large Language Model (LLM)
- Objective: It aims to provide the capability to understand and create multimodal data such as text, speech and images in Indian languages to make AI technology accessible to the diverse linguistic communities of India.
- Implementation: It is being implemented by the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) under the Department of Science and Technology (DST) led by IIT Bombay.
- Partners involved: Leading academic institutions like IIT Bombay, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIM Indore and IIT Madras are the partners.
Key Features
- Multimodal capability: Capable of understanding and generating various data types such as text, speech and images
- Multilingual support: It aims to provide seamless AI solutions in 22 Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi etc.
- Cultural relevance: Design in accordance with Indian cultural contexts and local knowledge sets it apart from global AI models.
- Ethical and inclusive AI: Unbiased and fair to all communities, based on principles of ethics.
- Diverse applications: Suitable for providing services in local languages in areas such as education, health, administration, agriculture.
- Open Source Platform: It has been developed as an open-source platform so that it can be easily used and modified by researchers, startups and industry.
- This initiative focuses on promoting generative AI research and development in India so that the country can play a leading role in this field.