Mitesh M Khapra

Mitesh M Khapra, associate professor at IIT Madras and the founding head of the AI4Bharat Research Lab, is quietly driving India towards AI that truly speaks Indian languages. His goal since 2020 has been to bring Indic AI up to the same standard as English.

What began with painstaking data collection and model-building across a few languages has blossomed into one of the world’s largest open-source datasets, supporting IndicTrans2, a translation model that covers all 22 scheduled Indian languages—and it’s only getting stronger.

Khapra’s earlier work at IBM Research India focused on machine translation, cross-language learning, and deep learning. He has published extensively in top-tier venues like ACL, EMNLP, and NeurIPS. His contributions earned him prestigious honours—including the IBM PhD Fellowship, Microsoft Rising Star, Google Faculty Research Award, and several teaching and research awards at IIT Madras.

A key partner in India’s Bhashini Mission, AI4Bharat now powers about 80% of its data engine. Nandan Nilekani calls his work “amazing”, pointing out that real-world impact begins by building quality data and capturing voices from Kashmiri to Maithili.

With deep research credentials, open-source spirit and a vision that embraces linguistic diversity, Khapra is unlocking India’s voice in the global AI conversation.