Infosys cofounder and chairman Nandan Nilekani on June 6 committed a second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat, an open-source initiative of IIT-Madras to build foundational artificial intelligence models for Indian languages.
“This grant, issued directly by Nandan Nilekani, reflects his belief that AI4Bharat is one of the most impactful technology infrastructure projects in India,” a joint statement said.
AI4Bharat’s work will play a vital role in making India the AI use case capital of the world, it said.
"Inclusion begins with access, and for Bharat, that means language,” Nilekani said. “AI4Bharat is building the infrastructure that ensures every Indian can access digital services in the language they speak.”
On February 21, Nilekani hailed IIT-M professor Mitesh Khapra and his work in AI. “Mitesh Khapra at IIT-Madras, he's building this AI4Bharat, which is part of the Bhashini programme. It's amazing what he's done,” Nilekani said.
Realising the potential early on, Nilekani founded EkStep Foundation and AI4Bharat began investing in language digitisation, data infrastructure, and early models tailored to Indian linguistic diversity.
When Generative AI (Gen AI) models burst into the mainstream in 2022 with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, India already had the foundations in place. Applications were built within weeks of ChatGPT's release, ranging from chatbots in regional languages to integrations in governance and education.
And the underlying infrastructure for this rapid deployment was AI4Bharat’s models.
AI4Bharat has quietly become the language backbone of India’s AI stack. Its open-source speech, translation and text-to-speech models now power key public digital platforms.
Bhashini, India’s national language platform under, has adopted AI4Bharat’s models to scale multilingual services across governance, healthcare, and finance.
The Supreme Court’s SUVAS system translates judgments into regional languages. NPCI has enabled voice-based UPI transactions in native tongues. Agricultural chatbots like Kisan e-Mitra use these models to deliver real-time information to farmers.
AI4Bharat’s language datasets, collected in all 22 constitutionally recognised languages, have been released as public good, openly available through the AI4Bharat website and integrated into AIKosh, India’s open AI repository.
IIT-M director Professor V Kamakoti said India-specific AI models have the potential to reduce the possibility of an AI divide. “I sincerely hope that AI4Bharat, with the generous support of Mr. Nandan Nilekani, will help in meeting these objectives,” he said.
In 2022, the first grant was instrumental in establishing the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, supported by EkStep Foundation, a non-profit focusing on building digital public infrastructure to improve access to learning, health, and livelihoods.
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