IBM and BharatGen Forge Alliance to Advance India’s Homegrown AI Effort

September 17, 2025

Details

  • IBM and BharatGen have entered into a strategic partnership, announced on September 17, 2025, to drive adoption of AI tailored specifically for India.
  • The collaboration brings together IBM and BharatGen, a government-backed initiative focused on multimodal large language models (LLMs) optimized for Indian languages and cultural contexts.
  • Both companies will collaborate on developing solution templates, building data pipelines, establishing governance frameworks, setting benchmarks, and conducting joint research for core sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, finance, and governance.
  • BharatGen, launched in June 2025 under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, offers AI models for speech (Shrutam), text (Param), document vision (Patram), and text-to-speech (Sooktam) and currently supports 9 Indian languages, with expansion to 15 by December 2025 and all 22 scheduled languages by June 2026.
  • Positioned as India’s sovereign answer to Western-centric AI offerings like GPT and LLaMA, BharatGen's pilots already impact agriculture, governance, and defense, with a growing footprint across critical applications.

Impact

This collaboration delivers a major boost to India’s sovereign AI ecosystem by blending IBM’s enterprise-scale expertise with BharatGen’s homegrown technology. As BharatGen expands its reach and language support, the partnership could reshape AI adoption across Indian sectors and provide a template for countries seeking alternatives to Western-led AI models.

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