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The government has selected eight new players to develop a foundational Large Language Model (LLM), under the India AI Mission including Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, BharatGen (an IIT-Bombay Consortium), Avataar AI and Shodh AI, among others.

For IIT-Bombay’s proposed LLM, the IndiaAI Mission is allocating financial assistance of ₹988.6 crore, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, said on Thursday.

Speaking at the pre-event of AI Impact Summit 2026, to be held in February, Vaishnaw said the LLM, which is proposed to be developed by IIT-Bombay, is expected to have one-trillion parameters. Parameters in LLM refer to the number of learned internal variables that capture patterns and relationships in language from training data.

IBM and BharatGen have also announced a strategic collaboration to advance the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India powered by BharatGen’s sovereign multimodal and Large Language Models (LLMs)  tailored to India’s unique linguistic and cultural landscape. 

This collaboration aims to bring together IBM’s AI expertise in data, governance and model training technology, and BharatGen’s national mandate and expertise to create inclusive, India-centric sovereign multimodal and Large Language Models (LLMs) rooted in indigenous context and values.

The initiative focuses on developing and scaling multimodal and language specific AI models and expanding their applications across various sectors, including education, agriculture, banking healthcare, citizen services and more. As part of this collaboration, BharatGen and IBM will aim to:

• Develop solution templates for Indic use cases leveraging BharatGen’s models and data with IBM’s AI technologies including IBM Granite Models.
• Create demonstrations and use case templates (RAG and targeted domains) on IBM Watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI.
• Build a scalable data pipeline using IBM’s selected open source tools, enhanced with Indic specific capabilities to streamline data preparation workflows. Implement a governance framework from IBM’s enterprise scale model development methodology to strengthen responsible model development.
• Create new benchmarks specifically suited for Indic domain and languages.
• Research new and emerging model architecture and technologies leveraging IBM and BharatGen’s  experience and expertise in high performance and purpose-built generative AI models.

“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 Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, BharatGen.

“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.”

“At IBM, we are committed to support the creation of open, trusted AI that solves real-world problems,” said Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia. “Through our collaboration with BharatGen, we aim to advance sovereign AI capabilities that reflect India’s diversity and deliver meaningful impact across sectors.”

BharatGen is a consortium under the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay and an Indian Government-Funded multimodal and large language model initiative for Indian languages, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). 

Its mandate is to build AI for the nation by developing efficient AI models for Indian languages, creating a multilingual data repository, fostering public-private partnerships for scalable AI, and strengthening India’s AI talent pool and startup ecosystem. BharatGen is building a family of LLMs and multi-modal FMs to serve diverse needs in India, including representing underserved languages, creating sovereign models for self-reliance, and partnering to build solutions for national importance across various sectors.