New Delhi: In a significant step towards building an inclusive and multilingual artificial intelligence ecosystem, the Centre on Wednesday announced that its flagship BharatGen AI initiative will support all 22 scheduled Indian languages by June 2026.
The initiative, part of India’s broader vision for self-reliant and ethical AI, is focused on developing sovereign foundational models suited to Indian languages, cultures, and real-world applications. The project currently supports nine languages and is steadily expanding.
In a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Science and Technology Dr. Jitendra Singh said BharatGen already supports Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada.
“By December 2025, the language base will grow to 15, including Assamese, Maithili, Nepali, Odia, Sanskrit, Sindhi, among others,” the minister said. Full coverage across all scheduled languages is expected by mid-2026.
BharatGen is India’s first government-supported AI initiative designed to address text, speech, and vision-language needs through locally trained models. It has already rolled out pilot applications in areas like agriculture, governance, and defence, demonstrating the potential of AI rooted in Indian contexts.
The project is being implemented under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), with the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay leading the charge. TIH is responsible for model development, data curation, academic partnerships, and long-term planning.
Dr. Singh informed Parliament that BharatGen is still in the pilot deployment phase and not yet accessible for public or institutional use. However, once fully operational, the platform will be rolled out nationwide, especially targeting rural and semi-urban populations to ensure wider digital equity.
The government is also exploring partnerships with research institutions in Karnataka to broaden BharatGen’s impact and reach.
The initiative received a major boost in June when the government officially launched BharatGen’s large language model (LLM) at the BharatGen Summit. Addressing the event, Dr. Singh described the programme as a “national mission to develop ethical, inclusive, and culturally grounded AI solutions” for India’s multilingual society.
