Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a technological upgrade—it is becoming the foundational infrastructure of the modern world. In this new AI era, nations are racing not only to use AI tools, but to build their own. India has now stepped decisively into this space through BharatGen, a sovereign generative AI initiative designed for India’s linguistic diversity, governance systems, and societal scale.
With the upcoming launch of PARAM-2 at the India AI Impact Summit, India signals its transition from AI adoption to AI creation at a foundational level.
From AI Consumers to AI Creators
For years, India has been a global technology powerhouse in services and software development. However, foundational AI models—large language and multimodal systems that power advanced applications—have largely been built outside the country.
BharatGen represents a structural shift.
Instead of relying entirely on foreign-trained systems, India is developing:
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Indigenous large language models
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AI trained on Indian datasets
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Systems fluent in all 22 Scheduled Indian languages
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Public digital AI infrastructure accessible to institutions
This approach ensures technological sovereignty while addressing India’s unique needs—multilingual governance, rural connectivity, legal complexity, and large-scale public service delivery.
PARAM-2: Engineering at National Scale
PARAM-2, a 17-billion-parameter multilingual Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, marks a critical milestone. Unlike earlier experimental models, PARAM-2 is engineered for national-scale deployment.
Key technological features include:
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Support for 22 Indian languages
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Optimized architecture for compute efficiency
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Scalable deployment across distributed infrastructure
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Capability for domain-specific fine-tuning
Earlier systems under BharatGen included smaller bilingual and multilingual models, as well as speech and voice systems. PARAM-2 consolidates these learnings into a more powerful and production-ready framework.
This progression reflects India’s growing maturity in foundational AI research and engineering.
The Public Digital Infrastructure Model
One of the most distinctive aspects of India’s AI strategy is its public digital infrastructure (PDI) approach.
Rather than centralizing AI as a private, cloud-only service, BharatGen models are intended to function as digital public goods. Government departments, courts, hospitals, banks, and educational institutions can deploy them locally—even in secure, air-gapped environments.
This reduces:
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Dependency on foreign cloud providers
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Data sovereignty risks
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Latency and energy consumption from centralized inference
The initiative is supported by the Department of Science and Technology and scaled under the IndiaAI Mission, which has onboarded over 38,000 GPUs to create a shared national AI compute facility.
This shared compute model avoids fragmented infrastructure and promotes sustainable resource utilization—an important factor in the energy-intensive AI landscape.
AI Built for India’s Linguistic Complexity
Global AI models are often optimized for English-dominant ecosystems. India’s reality is different: multilingual, multi-script, and culturally layered.
BharatGen’s architecture leverages linguistic similarities across Indian languages while respecting regional variation. This enables more efficient training and more culturally accurate outputs.
By embedding India’s languages and datasets at the core, the system improves accessibility for citizens who interact with governance, healthcare, education, and agriculture in their native tongues.
Responsible AI in the New Era
Technological capability without governance can create systemic risks. Recognizing this, India has embedded safety and accountability into its AI roadmap.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act establishes a legal framework for data privacy. Meanwhile, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued advisories and launched certification programs to strengthen AI cybersecurity and resilience.
India’s governance guidelines emphasize:
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Bias mitigation
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Transparency and auditability
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Risk-based regulation
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Deepfake detection
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Ethical AI deployment
This layered governance model aims to balance innovation with public trust.
From Labs to Real-World Systems
BharatGen is not confined to research papers. Domain-specific models are being developed for:
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Agriculture advisory services
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Legal document analysis
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Healthcare support systems
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Public administration workflows
The vision is augmentation, not replacement. AI systems are designed to assist judges, teachers, doctors, and administrators—improving efficiency without displacing institutional responsibility.
A Defining Moment for India
The AI revolution is reshaping economic competitiveness, national security, and digital sovereignty. Countries that control foundational models control the direction of innovation.
With BharatGen and PARAM-2, India is building the technological base required for long-term autonomy in AI. It is combining compute infrastructure, linguistic research, governance safeguards, and public digital frameworks into a unified national strategy.
This marks the beginning of a new AI era for India—one where the country is not merely adapting to global systems, but actively shaping them.
In this emerging landscape, BharatGen is more than a model release. It is a statement of intent: India will build, govern, and scale artificial intelligence on its own terms—technically robust, socially inclusive, and globally competitive.