BharatGen Signs MoU with IIT Bombay & C-DAC to Advance Sovereign AI for India’s Linguistic Diversity

BharatGen Technology Foundation has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) India to jointly advance foundational AI research for the country. The MoU was signed on March 17, coinciding with the 39th Foundation Day of C-DAC.

The collaboration is designed to build a sovereign AI infrastructure that is rooted in India's staggering linguistic diversity, a challenge no global AI model has adequately addressed thus far.

BharatGen, anchored at IIT Bombay and backed by the Department of Science and Technology under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), aims to develop models capable of handling more than 22 Indian languages and integrating text, speech, and document vision, making AI more intuitive for Indian users. 

C-DAC, an autonomous scientific society under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, brings decades of expertise in multilingual computing, high-performance computing infrastructure, and technology solutions designed for socio-economic impact, areas that closely mirror BharatGen’s national mandate.

IIT Bombay, as the institutional home of BharatGen, contributes the academic backbone and research leadership that has already driven the initiative to global recognition. BharatGen has been driving AI applications across governance, agriculture, legal frameworks, and education, building a custom India-centric AI stack for seamless deployment across both public and private sectors. 

“India’s linguistic diversity is one of the most complex challenges in AI, and one of the most important to get right. This collaboration brings together three institutions with a shared belief that sovereign AI for India must be built on a foundation of research excellence and national capability,” the company said in a statement.

Under the MoU, the three institutions will work together across four key research domains: distributed AI infrastructure for foundational model development; multimodal LLMs spanning speech, vision, and text; AI solutions specifically tailored for scheduled Indic, low-resource, and tribal languages; and the creation of multilingual datasets, model evaluation frameworks, and benchmarks.

The emphasis on tribal and low-resource languages marks a deliberate departure from mainstream AI development, where such communities are almost universally overlooked.

The MoU arrives as BharatGen simultaneously builds out the hardware and compute layer of India’s sovereign AI stack. BharatGen recently signed a landmark MoU with L&T Semiconductor Technologies and L&T Vyoma to jointly design, build, and deploy an end-to-end sovereign AI compute platform for India, integrating custom AI ASIC chips optimised for BharatGen's workloads, an AI-ready 30 MW data centre facility in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram, and foundational AI models spanning LLMs, SLMs, and multimodal AI systems tailored to India's diverse needs.

The signing was conducted in the presence of India's Principal Scientific Adviser, underscoring the national importance attached to the initiative.