New Delhi: IIT Bombay has introduced BharatGen at Bharat Innovates 2026 in Nice, France, placing India’s homegrown AI effort in front of a global technology
audience. The event is being held from June 14 to 16, at a time when countries are treating artificial intelligence as a strategic technology.
The project has been described by IIT Bombay as “Open, multilingual AI for India’s languages and people.” For India, where a person may speak Hindi at home, use English at work and read documents in a regional language, that matters more than it may first sound.
AI that thinks in India’s own languages.
IIT Bombay is proud to present BharatGen to the world: Open, multilingual AI for India’s languages and people, at Bharat Innovates 2026 in Nice, France (14–16 June).
BharatGen is built at IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and…
— IIT Bombay (@iitbombay) June 15, 2026
What is BharatGen?
BharatGen is not just one chatbot. It is a family of AI models built to work with Indian languages, speech and documents.
The stack includes Param2, a foundational text model with reasoning, coding and tool-calling abilities across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. It also includes Shrutam2, which handles multilingual speech recognition and speech-to-text. Sooktam2 is a text-to-speech system with zero-shot voice cloning, which means it can create a similar voice after listening to a small sample. Patram, another part of the stack, is built to understand Indian documents and forms.
For many users, this could mean AI that can read a government form, listen to a local language query, or help with a health or education service without forcing English into the middle.
Sovereign AI push
BharatGen’s launch comes as the global AI race is becoming more geopolitical. US authorities asking Anthropic to restrict access to advanced AI models such as Fable 5 and Mythos for foreign nationals have raised fresh questions about who gets access to frontier AI.
India is trying to reduce that risk by building systems at home. The project has received ₹235 crore through the Department of Science and Technology under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, and ₹1,058 crore through MeitY’s IndiaAI Mission.
Who is building it?
The initiative is being developed at IIT Bombay’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. It is led by Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, with Rishi Bal as CEO and Maneesh Singh as Vice President of Machine Learning, IIT Bombay said in a post on X.
A consortium of nine academic institutions is supporting the project. More than 60 researchers, engineers and linguists are working on AI systems for text, speech and documents across Indian languages.
Union Minister Jitendra Singh earlier called BharatGen India’s first government-owned sovereign large language model and multilingual AI stack. He said, “Artificial Intelligence is no longer an option but an essential component of working in every sphere of life.”
He also described BharatGen as a “whole-of-science, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” initiative. The big test now is simple: can it move from labs and events to real use for regular Indians?
