India’s 1st AI-driven multilingual model will shape future of governance: Minister Jitendra Singh

NEW DELHI: Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh has hailed "BharatGen" as India's first sovereign multilingual and multimodal AI-driven Large Language Model.

During his visit to IIT Bombay, Singh stated that BharatGen will shape the future of governance and innovation in India. BharatGen is India's first sovereign effort to create a Large Language Model that truly reflects the linguistic, cultural, and social diversity of the nation.

Built to support over twenty-two Indian languages, BharatGen integrates three major modalities- text, speech, and document vision, so that it can understand, generate and interpret information in the same way Indian citizens naturally communicate.

Singh appreciated the scale, ambition, and technical depth of the BharatGen initiative, describing it as a turning point in India's journey toward technological self-reliance.

"BharatGen is not just a technological project but a national effort to ensure that the future of AI reflects the aspirations, languages and lived experiences of 1.4 billion Indians," he said.

The minister also emphasised that initiatives like BharatGen embody the Prime Minister's vision of empowering every citizen through science and technology, building systems that are inclusive, trustworthy, and locally grounded, and ensuring that India's digital narrative is written by Indians themselves.

BharatGen is supported under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) of the Department of Science and Technology, with Rs 235 crore being channelled through the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay.

The consortium, led by IIT Bombay, includes leading institutions such as IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, IIT Kharagpur and IIIT Delhi.  (IANS)

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