MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, long seen as a launchpad for India’s brightest startups, has quietly crossed an even more telling milestone. It incorporated a company of its own. This is not an incubated spinoff or a faculty-seeded venture, but an organisation owned and anchored by IIT Bombay itself.On Nov 7, 2025, BharatGen Technology Foundation was registered with the Registrar of Companies in Mumbai, carrying the Powai institution’s address as its own-an unmistakable signal of how India’s top engineering school plans to shape the future of artificial intelligence. BharatGen, the country’s first attempt to build a Large Language Model that mirrors India’s linguistic, cultural, and social diversity, first took shape last year after the Department of Science and Technology (DST) laid the groundwork with Rs 235 crore in initial support, signalling an early bet on public infrastructure for AI. The project is supported under the DST’s National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). Led by IIT Bombay, the BharatGen consortium brings together several leading institutions, including IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, IIT Kharagpur, and IIIT Delhi.“To take the models from the lab to market requires the functional freedom and autonomy of a corporation as opposed to being just an academic project,” said Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan, IIT Bombay’s professor who is the founder director of BharatGen Technology Foundation Designed to work across more than 22 Indian languages, BharatGen combines text, speech, and document vision, so AI can interpret information the way citizens naturally speak, read, or interact. BharatGen’s ambition is not just to build large language models, but to build ones that sound and think like India. Its strength, said Prof Ramakrishna, lies in training systems on home-grown datasets and Indian languages-an approach he believes will make them far more dependable in real-world use.He added that the foundation plans to release distilled versions of its models to developers, allowing startups and enterprises to plug into sovereign AI without the cost or expertise of training colossal systems on their own. In other words, hesaid, BharatGen will do the heavy lifting so the country’s innovators can get straight to building.The initiative has now received an additional Rs 1,058 crore from MeitY under the IndiaAI Mission, expanding BharatGen into a national sovereign AI effort.
