India’s Sovereign AI BharatGen Secures Rs. 988.6 Crore Under India AI Mission; Receives Largest Share of MeitY’s Rs.1,500 Crore Allocation

BharatGen, India’s first government-backed multimodal Sovereign AI flagship initiative, has been awarded funding of Rs.988.6 crore by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The formal announcement was made by Hon’ble Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, during an event at Hotel The Ashok, New Delhi.

The allocation positions BharatGen as the foremost beneficiary of the Rs.1,500 crore India AI Mission 2025, highlighting its central role in building India’s sovereign AI ecosystem.

The funding will help BharatGen create powerful AI models, including Large Language and Multimodal Models with up to one trillion parameters, as well as smaller models designed for specific uses. It will also boost the development of India-focused technologies like text-to-speech, speech recognition, and vision-language tools. The models are expected to support real-world applications across key areas such as agriculture, governance, finance, healthcare, and education. To make this possible, BharatGen will train the models on advanced supercomputing clusters, while also setting aside resources for other essential needs.

Earlier this year, BharatGen launched Param-1, a bilingual LLM with 2.9 billion parameters, pretrained on 5 trillion tokens in English and Hindi. The next phase will expand to multilingual and multimodal AI systems across all 22 scheduled Indian languages, ensuring equitable access for every citizen. The BharatGen consortium includes leading institutions such as IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, IIIT Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur, strengthening the mission’s collaborative foundation.

Sharing his excitement on the announcement, Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, IIT Bombay & Principal Investigator, stated, “The allocation will empower BharatGen to advance its foundational models, strengthen India’s AI infrastructure, drive enterprise adoption, and enable developers through our Sovereign AI stack, while ensuring inclusive access across the country’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. As a national sovereign AI ecosystem, BharatGen brings together a consortium of dedicated faculty members committed to this vision.”