BharatGen AI to cover all 22 scheduled Indian languages by 2026: Government

BharatGen, the government-backed national initiative to create sovereign foundational AI models for Indian languages and contexts, will cover all 22 scheduled Indian languages by June 2026, the Lok Sabha was informed on Wednesday.

Currently, the models span nine languages: Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada. The roadmap sets a milestone of expanding coverage to 15 languages, including Assamese, Maithili, Nepali, Odia, Sanskrit, and Sindhi, by December 2025, before completing the list in mid-2026.

The AI models address multiple modalities such as large language models for text, text-to-speech, automatic speech recognition, and vision-language systems. According to the government, BharatGen has already developed pilot applications in agriculture, governance, and defence, which are planned to be rolled out nationwide once fully deployed.

BharatGen operates under the Department of Science and Technology’s National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). The TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay serves as the central hub, managing program execution, national academic collaboration, and ecosystem partnerships for compute, data, and talent. IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation at IIT Madras functions as an implementation partner, focusing on governance, security, and media-related applications.

The BharatGen consortium includes:
    •    IIT Bombay: Lead institution overseeing research and integration
    •    IIIT Hyderabad: Vision-language document modelling
    •    IIT Madras: Speech model development and evaluation
    •    IIT Kanpur: Legal AI research and multilingual tokenisation strategies
    •    IIT Hyderabad: Vocabulary optimisation for multilingual LLMs
    •    IIT Mandi: Inclusive multilingual model development and efficient training methods
    •    IIM Indore: Bharat-centric benchmarking and multilingual data collection

Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh stated that while BharatGen is in its pilot phase and not yet publicly available, the plan is to deploy it across all states and districts. Partnerships with additional research institutions in Karnataka may also be explored.