Lok Sabha Question No. 257 (STARRED), answered on 2025-08-06
Subject: BharatGen AI Models
Ministry: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Asked by: Shri Janardan Mishra, Shri Janardan Singh Sigriwal

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LOK SABHA

STARRED QUESTION No. *257 ANSWERED ON 06/08/2025

## BHARATGEN AI MODELS

- *257.  SHRI JANARDAN SINGH SIGRIWAL: SHRI JANARDAN MISHRA:

Will the Minister of SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY be pleased to state:

- (a)       the  details  of the number of Indian languages currently supported by BharatGen's AI model and the road map for achieving full language coverage;
- (b)       the specific applications of BharatGen in the healthcare, agriculture, education, and governance sectors, State and District-wise including DewasShajapur, Madhya Pradesh;
- (c)      the number of Technology Innovation Hubs and Translational Research Parks currently active under the BharatGen network and their thematic focus, State-wise;
- (d)      the details of the institutions involved in the BharatGen consortium and their role in its development and deployment;
- (e)      whether the Government proposes to partner with academic or research institutions in Dakshina Kannada to promote BharatGen's research, language development or pilot applications in the region and if so, the details thereof;
- (f)       whether the Government has launched or is in the process of launching BharatGen AI for public and institutional use in the Dewas-Shajapur, Lok Sabha Constituency of Madhya Pradesh; and
- (g)      if so, the details thereof including the objectives, features and intended user groups of BharatGen AI and the benefits to the rural and semi-urban areas of Dewas-Shajapur?

## ANSWER

MINISTER OF STATE (INDEPENDENT CHARGE) OF THE MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AND EARTH SCIENCES (DR. JITENDRA SINGH)

विज्ञान और प्रौद्योगिकी तथा पृ थ्िी विज्ञान मंत्रालय क े राज्य मंत्री ( स्ितंत्र प्रभार) ( डॉ. जितेंद्र स ंह )

- (a) to (g):  A statement is laid on the Table of the House.

STATEMENT  AS  REFERRED  IN  REPLY  TO  PARTS  (a)  to  (g)  OF  LOK SABHA  STARRED  QUESTION  NO.  257  FOR  06.08.2025  REGARDING 'BHARATGEN AI MODELS'

(a) to (g):           BharatGen is the first government supported national initiative to develop a range of sovereign foundational AI models tailored to Indian languages and societal contexts. It spans multiple modalities, including text (via Large Language Models), speech (Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition), and vision-language systems.

Currently, BharatGen models cover 9 Indian languages which include Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada.

Roadmap  of  language  coverage  across  these  models  includes  the following milestones:

-  By  December  2025,  a  total  of  15  Indian  Languages  (including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil and Telugu) will be covered.
-  By June 2026, all 22 scheduled Indian languages will be covered.

BharatGen  has  developed  applications  in  the  sectors  of  agriculture, governance and defence, wherein pilots have been carried out. Once deployed fully, it is planned to make these applications available across all states and districts.

BharatGen is implemented as a project under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary  Cyber-Physical  Systems  (NM-ICPS)  of  Department  of Science  and  Technology  (DST).  As  part  of  the  BharatGen  network, following Technology Innovation Hubs (TIHs) are currently active:

- 1.
- TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE, IIT Bombay (Maharashtra)

This TIH is hosting the BharatGen project and serves as the central program implementation and coordination hub. It is responsible for end-to-end execution, including managing the national academic consortium, overseeing the development of sovereign foundational AI models across text, speech, and vision, and driving ecosystem partnerships  for  compute,  data,  and  talent.  The  TIH  also  drives governance  and  strategic  planning  for  the  BharatGen  project, ensuring cohesive progress across all stakeholders.

2. IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, IIT Madras (Tamil Nadu) solutioning and real-world deployment of BharatGen

This  TIH  serves  as  an  implementation  partner,  focusing  on AI technologies. Thematic focus areas include governance, security, and media-related use cases.

The following institutions are a part of the BharatGen consortium:

| Institution Name                                             | Institution Name                                             | Role in BharatGen                                                                                            |
|--------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay                       | Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay                       | Lead institution, guiding research and integration across consortium partners                                |
| International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad | International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad | Vision-language document modeling                                                                            |
| Indian Institute Technology, Madras                          | of                                                           | Speech foundation model development and evaluation                                                           |
| Indian Institute Technology, Kanpur                          | of                                                           | Legal AI research, domain- specific datasets, and developing tokenization strategies for multilingual models |
| Indian Institute Technology, Hyderabad                       | of                                                           | Advanced tokenization and vocabulary optimization for large multilingual LLMs                                |
| Indian Institute Technology, Mandi                           | of                                                           | Inclusive multilingual model development and research on efficient training strategies for LLMs              |
| Indian Institute Management, Indore                          | of                                                           | Bharat-centric evaluation and benchmarking of LLMs, multilingual and multimodal data collection              |

While BharatGen is working with the above consortia members, it may explore partnerships with research institutions in Karnataka.

Since BharatGen AI is currently under pilot deployment phase, it has not been released for public and institutional use. Once fully deployed, there is a plan to extend its applicability across all states and districts.

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