IIIT Hyderabad leads BharatGen’s push for sovereign AI

HYDERABAD: As India accelerates efforts to build sovereign artificial intelligence (AI), the Centre has allocated ₹988.6 crore to BharatGen, the country’s first government-backed multi-modal AI initiative.

BharatGen, spearheaded by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, brings together leading institutions including IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore and IIT Madras.

IIITH develops India’s first Indic vision-language model

IIIT Hyderabad, a founding member of the consortium, is playing a pivotal role in advancing India-specific vision and language models. The team led by Prof RaviKiran Sarvadevabhatla recently unveiled Patram, a 7-billion parameter vision-language model designed to process scanned and photographed Indic documents.

“We trained this model from scratch. The quality of data was critical, and our team ensured the model works across diverse use cases. It can also be fine-tuned for specialised domains like medicine or law,” said Prof RaviKiran.

Indic e-commerce model launched

The team has also developed e-VikrAI, India’s first vision-language model for e-commerce. The model automates cataloguing by translating and vocalising product descriptions in multiple Indian languages, reducing reliance on manual inputs for sellers.

IIITH’s research culture

The Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT) at IIITH has been central to these advances. “We always aim for top-tier research and engineering excellence. Students have played a critical role in creating these Indic models,” added Prof RaviKiran.

Roadmap for future AI models

On the roadmap are improved versions of Patram, including multi-page processing and text-grounding features. “Over the past year, we built foundation models and applications. But scaling to more languages requires greater compute and funding. This MeitY allocation comes at the right time,” said Prof RaviKiran.

Prof Sandeep Shukla, Director of IIITH, noted: “BharatGen has the potential to power applications in finance, agriculture, legal and cybersecurity. We are proud of IIITH’s leadership role in this national effort.”

Prof C V Jawahar, Dean (R&D) at IIITH, called it a “unique experiment in creating powerful AI models for India with cutting-edge academic research.”

Telangana IT minister Duddilla Sridhar Babu welcomed the Centre’s investment. “IIIT Hyderabad’s contributions to BharatGen and Bhashini show India’s strength in Indic language and vision technologies. This landmark funding will accelerate innovation,” he said.