IBM, BharatGen join forces to build AI models for Indian languages

IBM and BharatGen have announced a collaboration to develop AI systems tailored to India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.

The partnership will focus on creating multimodal and language-specific AI models to be used across various sectors, including education, agriculture, banking, healthcare, citizen services, and more.

The two organisations plan to combine BharaGen’s sovereign multimodal and large language models (LLMs) with IBM’s AI expertise in data, governance and model training.

“At BharatGen, we have been building sovereign AI models and the ecosystem that reflects the linguistic richness, cultural nuances, and diverse needs of our people. This collaboration with IBM allows us to bring cutting-edge global research, scalable architectures and inclusive systems for India,” said BharatGen Principal Investigator Ganesh Ramakrishnan.

“With IBM’s strength in enterprise-grade platforms and our commitment to public-good AI, we are on a path to drive transformative solutions for empowering India’s digital journey across domains such as agriculture, finance, education and governance.”

As part of the partnership, the pair aim to develop solution templates that adapt AI technology for Indic use cases using BharatGen’s models and data with IBM’s AI technologies, including IBM Granite Models. This includes creating demonstrations and prototypes developed through IBM’s Watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI platforms.

Another key element will be building scalable data pipelines using IBM’s open-source tools enhanced for Indic languages to streamline data preparation workflows.

IBM and trusted AI

The partnership will also incorporate governance frameworks from IBM’s enterprise scale model to ensure responsible and transparent model development. In addition, the two organisations will create benchmarks for AI performance tailored to the Indic domain and languages and domains, and will jointly research emerging model architectures.

“At IBM, we are committed to supporting the creation of open, trusted AI that solves real-world problems,” said IBM India and South Asia Managing Director Sandip Patel.

“Through our collaboration with BharatGen, we aim to advance sovereign AI capabilities that reflect India’s diversity and deliver meaningful impact across sectors.”

The move is part of BharatGen’s AI roadmap, where a priority is to include underserved Indian languages and dialects beyond the most widely spoken, while also addressing both national and commercial needs across agriculture, education, healthcare, national security and finance.