Team siliconindia

• IIT Bombay incorporates its own company, BharatGen Technology Foundation
• BharatGen aims to build India-focused large language models across 22+ languages
• Project receives over Rs 1,293 crore in government support from DST and MeitY

IIT Bombay has taken a major step in India’s artificial intelligence journey by setting up its own company, BharatGen Technology Foundation. Registered on November 7, 2025, the company is fully owned and operated by the institute, marking a rare move where an IIT creates an independent organisation to drive innovation at scale. The new entity signals IIT Bombay’s intention to play a central role in shaping the country’s sovereign AI capabilities.

BharatGen began as India’s first large language model (LLM) project built to reflect the nation’s linguistic and cultural diversity. The initiative received an initial Rs 235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems. Its consortium includes top institutions such as IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, and IIIT Delhi.

According to Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, founder director of BharatGen Technology Foundation, creating a separate corporation provides the autonomy needed to move AI models from research labs to real-world applications. BharatGen is being designed to understand text, speech, and documents in more than 22 Indian languages, enabling AI to read, listen, and respond the way Indians naturally communicate.

Also Read: Victoria University to Open India's First Block-Model Campus in Gurugram

The project focuses on building models trained on Indian datasets, which Prof. Ramakrishnan says will make them more accurate and reliable for local use. The foundation plans to release lighter, distilled versions of its models to developers, helping startups and businesses access sovereign AI without heavy infrastructure costs.

The initiative has now been boosted with an additional Rs 1,058 crore from MeitY under the IndiaAI Mission, pushing BharatGen into a national-scale AI effort.