IIIT Hyderabad is playing a crucial role in India’s push for sovereign AI, participating in the BharatGen consortium. This national mission, funded with Rs 988.6 crore from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), seeks to create AI solutions that respect India’s diverse languages and cultures.
BharatGen is led by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS). It includes top academic institutions like IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIM Indore, and IIT Madras. IIIT Hyderabad contributes significantly through its Vision Language Model (VLM) team, headed by Prof. RaviKiran Sarvadevabhatla. They focus on creating foundational models and applications for Indic languages.
A major development from IIIT Hyderabad is Patram, India’s first Vision Language Foundational Model for Indic documents. This model, trained on seven billion parameters, can read and interpret documents, answer questions, and adapt to specific fields like medicine and law. Prof. RaviKiran highlighted that they built Patram from scratch using high-quality data.
Alongside Patram is eVikrAI, designed for Indic e-commerce by the same team. This model aids product cataloguing by translating and vocalizing descriptions in multiple Indian languages, making it easier for sellers nationwide.
These innovations come from IIIT Hyderabad’s Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), a leading lab for vision research in India. Prof. RaviKiran mentioned that their students and researchers are consistently advancing the field. He also stressed the importance of strategic partnerships for developing domain-specific models in areas like science and law.
IIIT Hyderabad plans to expand Patram’s features, including multi-page document processing. Prof. RaviKiran noted that scaling these models requires significant computing power and funding, with MeitY’s support being crucial. Although the models are open source, their training methods will be shared soon to promote transparency and collaboration.
IIIT Hyderabad Director Prof. Sandeep Shukla called BharatGen a project of “strategic national importance,” with applications in finance, agriculture, legal services, and cybersecurity. He expressed pride in contributing to India’s AI independence.
Supporting this view, Prof. C V Jawahar, Dean of R&D and head of CVIT, described BharatGen as a “unique experiment” in academic collaboration for building powerful AI models. He noted the project’s promising early results.
Telangana IT Minister Duddilla Sridhar Babu commended IIIT Hyderabad for its leadership in AI research, particularly in projects like Bhashini and Patram. He stated that this significant investment would enable BharatGen to create innovations that truly represent India’s linguistic and cultural diversity.
