IBM and BharatGen partner to boost sovereign AI adoption in India

IBM and BharatGen have partnered to develop sovereign multimodal AI models rooted in India's linguistic and cultural diversity, aiming to expand AI adoption across key sectors

IBM and BharatGen today 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 the country’s linguistic and cultural landscape.

 

The collaboration aims to combine IBM’s AI expertise in data, governance and model training technology with BharatGen’s national mandate and knowledge to create inclusive, India-centric multimodal and large language models rooted in indigenous context and values.

 

The initiative focuses on developing and scaling multimodal and language-specific AI models, and expanding their applications across sectors such as education, agriculture, banking, healthcare and citizen services.

 

As part of the collaboration, BharatGen and IBM will work to develop solution templates for Indic use cases by leveraging BharatGen’s models and data with IBM’s AI technologies, including IBM Granite models. They will also create demonstrations and use case templates, including retrieval-augmented generation and targeted domains, on IBM Watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI.

 

“At BharatGen, we have been building sovereign AI models and an 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 of 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,” he added.

 

The partnership will also build a scalable data pipeline using IBM’s selected open-source tools, enhanced with Indic-specific capabilities to streamline data preparation workflows. It will implement a governance framework from IBM’s enterprise-scale model development methodology to strengthen responsible model development.

 

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia, said: “Through our collaboration with BharatGen, we aim to advance sovereign AI capabilities that reflect India’s diversity and deliver meaningful impact across sectors.”

 

BharatGen’s LLM and foundation model roadmap is designed to address both national and commercial needs across agriculture, education, healthcare, national security and finance. A key priority is the inclusion of underserved Indian languages and dialects beyond the top 12–22, ensuring broader digital participation and equity.