BharatGen building indigenous AI stack rooted in Indian language and culture: IIT-B's Ganesh Ramakrishnan

New Delhi [India] September 19 (ANI): BharatGen is building a fully indigenous generative AI stack -- one that reflects the Indianness of language, thought processes, dialects, and cultural concepts, said Ganesh Ramakrishan, a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

He said that with a strong emphasis on data sovereignty, the initiative ensures that all data remains within India's borders, enabling secure, local deployment of AI solutions without the risk of external exposure.

This marks a pivotal step in India's mission to create AI systems that are not only technologically advanced but also deeply rooted in the nation's unique linguistic and cultural fabric, Ramakrishan.

"We are building the entire generative AI stack with Indianness, in terms of language, in terms of thought processes, in terms of the dialects, concepts, and most importantly, the data is also going to reside locally. We'll have control on that, which means it's possible to also deploy solutions locally without exposing data to anyone else at all," Ramakrishan added.

Speaking on the importance of technological sovereignty, he stressed the need for India to own and control the entire AI stack -- from data ingestion to output generation. "Bharat Jan being sovereign, what it means is we have an understanding of the entire recipes," he said, comparing it to owning the seeds of a tree rather than relying on foreign sources.

This sovereignty, according to him, allows India to create AI solutions that are not only compute-efficient and resource-friendly, but also faithful to our context. "You have to break it," he noted, when referring to processing Indian languages. But improper segmentation could lead to inefficiencies and inaccuracies, as in the example of breaking "manah na" into "ma" and "nana." This reflects deeper interpretability concerns rooted in language structure, dialect, and phoneme alignment.

Beyond linguistic compatibility, sovereignty in AI also offers security advantages. He cited critical sectors such as defence and research labs that require air-gapped solutions -- systems that are completely isolated from external networks. "You need to be able to have complete control over the entire stack that is ingesting the data and is producing output based on the data. The sovereignty also has implications for air-gapped solutions," he stated.

Touching upon practical applications, Professor Ramakrishnan revealed how domain-specific small language models (SLMs) are already being used in sectors such as health, land records, finance, legal, agriculture, and Ayurveda. "These models also become inference-friendly," he said, adding that although Bharat Gen models may not be directly available to the public, they are made accessible through commercial enterprises and startups.

He underscored the ecosystem's collaborative nature: "We, in fact, are working with many entities who are giving us constant feedback on the models that have been released." This feedback loop is vital for refining and scaling the models to serve both large and small needs.

Speaking on the capabilities of large models, he emphasised their agentic nature: "Large models have this ability to serve as agents. So agentic means that I can call different tools... That's the capacity of a large model." These models can serve as orchestrators, managing complex tasks and integrating with smaller domain-specific models.

Professor Ramakrishnan concluded by tying the technological mission to the national vision of development. "The importance of sovereign models, a sovereign deep tech stack, is also that this has long-term implications. Modi Ji has his very rightful vision of Viksit Bharat 2047 to help us realise that Bharat Jan is committed not only as a current initiative, but also as a mission," he said.

BharatGen, India's first government-backed multimodal Sovereign AI flagship initiative, secured over Rs 900 crore in funding by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

The quest for a sovereign AI model from India is in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision for an Atmanirbhar Bharat as laid out in his recent speech from the Red Fort on Independence Day.

The formal announcement on IndiaAI Mission's support to BharatGen was made by Union Minister of Electronics & IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, at a Press Conference that was held in New Delhi. (ANI)

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