Mitesh Khapra

Over the past several months, Mitesh Khapra has continued to lead AI4Bharat’s mission of building open AI for Indian languages. Under his leadership, the organisation expanded its suite of multilingual datasets, speech technologies and open-source language models while deepening collaborations with the IndiaAI Mission, BHASHINI and academic institutions. AI4Bharat’s work has remained foundational to many of India’s multilingual AI initiatives, enabling developers and researchers to build models that better represent the country’s linguistic diversity.

Khapra has consistently advocated an open ecosystem for Indian AI, arguing that publicly available datasets, models and benchmarks are essential for accelerating innovation. Throughout the year, he has emphasised that India’s AI progress will depend not just on compute but on high-quality language resources, community collaboration and sustained investment in open research, ensuring that Indian languages are first-class citizens in the AI era.