AI Impact Summit 2026: AI no longer optional, essential across all spheres of life:Jitendra Singh

Artificial Intelligence is no longer an option but an essential component of work across every sphere of life, Indian Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday while lauding India’s first government-owned, sovereign multilingual large language model under the BharatGen initiative.

Addressing a session titled “BharatGen Models: Vision and Technical Execution 2026” at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Singh said the development of a sovereign AI stack marked a major milestone in India’s journey towards technological self-reliance.

The session was hosted by BharatGen in association with the India AI Mission, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and the Department of Science and Technology (DST), as part of the Global AI Summit.

Singh said BharatGen stood out as a government-owned, sovereign, multilingual and multimodal large language model initiative tailored to India’s socio-cultural context and linguistic diversity. While large language models exist globally, he said BharatGen’s distinctiveness lay in its sovereign, government-supported character, reflecting an early and proactive policy approach to emerging technologies.

The minister described BharatGen as a “whole-of-science, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation” initiative. The project is being implemented through a consortium led by the TIH Foundation for IoT and IoE at IIT Bombay, with partner institutions including IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIM Indore and IIT Madras.

He said the initiative is supported by the Department of Science and Technology through the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) with funding of ₹235 crore, and further strengthened by the India AI Mission under MeitY with an outlay of ₹10,585 crore.

Highlighting the technological scope of BharatGen, Singh said the initiative spans multiple AI modalities, including text-based large language models, speech technologies such as text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition, and document vision-language models. He said the foundational models are designed for India-centric applications in governance, healthcare, education, agriculture and legal systems, particularly in linguistically diverse regions.

Referring to recent developments, Singh said BharatGen has already released domain-specific fine-tuned models, including Ayur Param for Ayurveda, Agri Param for agriculture and Legal Param for the Indian legal domain. He added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched BharatGen’s latest models, including the Param-2 text foundation model in 22 scheduled Indian languages with 17 billion parameters, Shrutam speech-to-text models in 12 Indian languages, Sooktam text-to-speech models in 12 languages, and Patram models under the DocBodh framework for multilingual access to complex Indian documents.

The minister said India’s linguistic diversity extends beyond the 22 scheduled languages and stressed the need to continuously expand datasets to include widely spoken regional languages and dialects, particularly for sectors such as digital health and public service delivery.

Singh also said BharatGen’s ecosystem integrates academia, government and industry through collaborative funding mechanisms. He noted that the initiative has been transformed into a Section-8 company, the BharatGen Technology Foundation, enabling national-scale operations while ensuring data and model sovereignty through platforms such as Bharat Data Sagar.

Calling for a shift in mindset in both public and private sectors, Singh said emerging technologies like AI require collaborative approaches rather than siloed functioning. He said the government remained committed to enabling innovation through supportive policies, early-stage funding and openness to private participation so that India keeps pace with global technological advancements.

The session also featured presentations by Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen; Ganesh Ramakrishnan, principal investigator at IIT Bombay; S. Ravi Kiran of IIIT Hyderabad; and Amol Gite, vice president of BharatGen. Addresses were delivered by Kris Gopalakrishnan, chairman of NM-ICPS; S. Krishnan, secretary, MeitY; Abhay Karandikar, secretary, DST; and Ajay Kumar Sood, principal scientific adviser. An MoU exchange between BharatGen and the IIT Bombay Heritage Foundation also took place in the presence of the minister.

Concluding his address, Singh said BharatGen represents a new phase in India’s AI journey, combining sovereign capability, collaborative execution and inclusive design, and will play a key role in building a robust national AI infrastructure aligned with the vision of Viksit Bharat.