“Voice of India”, Open Magzine, October 23, 2025
“IN THE HALLS OF Parliament, where microphones crackle, dialects collide, and debates are often unruly, the act of transcription can feel Sisyphean. For years, the official record has struggled to keep pace. But when BharatGen’s automatic speech recognition was integrated into the Sansad TV system, it resulted in a 30 per cent relative improvement in word error rate, better handling of dialects, and fewer phrases lost in the melee. It was, in some ways, proof of concept for BharatGen. If it could build a system that survived the chaos of Parliament, then perhaps its voice AI solutions could decipher grievance calls made amidst kitchen clatter and read between the silences of a rural health survey where female interviewees barely speak above a whisper.
That is the story of BharatGen, a government-backed, academically driven effort incorporated as a non-profit at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and run by a consortium of nine institutions—IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, IIIT Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur—that is building India’s national sovereign AI ecosystem and the first government-funded Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). It aims to deliver models that are accurate, affordable, and deployable at scale, seeding an ecosystem that startups, system integrators, and government departments can adapt for real-world use.
“What UPI did for payments, voice AI must do for services—work everywhere, for everyone, in every Indian language,” says Ganesh Ramakrishnan, principal investigator at BharatGen and a professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. BharatGen operates as a professional company with returning diaspora leadership—executive vice president Rishi Bal after stints at Microsoft and Google Research, and Maneesh Singh, a senior AI researcher with over two decades of experience in the US—alongside academic leads. The effort is funded at a scale that is meaningful, even if not yet comparable to those of the US or China: `235 crore from the Department of Science and Technology, and another `988.6 crore in September 2025 from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology through the IndiaAI Mission, making BharatGen the largest single beneficiary of the Union government’s `1,500 crore allocation in this year’s Budget……….”
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