"India should embrace indigenous concepts for AI Sovereignty": Shireesh Kedare, Director IIT Bombay

New Delhi [India], September 18 (ANI): India should work with the indigenous concepts as the sovereignty in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is important, said Shireesh B Kedare, Director, IIT Bombay.
Speaking to ANI, IIT Bombay Director said, "Indians should work with Indian languages. Indians should work with Indian concepts. We need not convert everything to English and use the AI models of which are basically in English. So this is a sovereignty that I think is very important, and IIT Bombay is committed to that. And it's thankful for the government for such an integrated mission, including Maiti DST and Ministry of Education, of course, in this effort"
In a major push toward building sovereign artificial intelligence capabilities, IIT Bombay is spearheading the development of a large language model (LLM) tailored specifically for India, under the project Bharat Gen.
Kedare revealed the institute's expanding role in the government's AI India Mission, with a focus on generative AI that reflects the country's linguistic and cultural diversity.
"On different aspects of AI. And these are all basically student projects, small projects from the government and other things. But the main thing started with maybe seven, eight years back, where the data, Indian data, Indian manuscripts, data is being digitised," Kedare said.
He added that the real momentum began between July and October last year when the team began working on an LLM model with support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
The project has now evolved into a full-fledged generative AI initiative under a new Section 8 company called Bharat Gen, which will be launched soon. "We will do Gen AI, the main generative AR AI, which requires a lot of compute, and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is supporting us on a lot of compute time, sponsoring it," he said.
Kedare highlighted the significance of creating an Indian-owned AI model. "The Gen AI that we will come up with, and we are coming up with, is not owned by any private company. It cannot be bought out. It is owned by a Section eight company under IIT Bombay, which is basically the government of India, and the government of India will have representation on this company also," he said.
Speaking on the current status of the project, Kedare said Bharat Gen is already functional across various domains. "Bharat Gen is already rolling out in various ways. For example, Professor Ganesh and his team, along with Rishi, have come up with this legal paradigm of Ayurveda, agricultural aspects, which can now help agriculturist Kisan to ask their problem and get a reply in their language," he said.
The applications go beyond agriculture. "We are delivering the AI platforms that can be helpful for the defence sectors to do their work. So these are various things rolling out," he said, adding that AI would soon become integrated into financial services, mobile platforms, and government ministries. "Will maybe take some time, but will not be far off," he said.
When asked how Bharat Gen compares with global models like ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek, Kedare was clear on the distinction. "These are commercial or usable models for individuals, but AI, in a very large sense, is already being done by us... What we are working on is a much larger domain in which various sectors and industry ministries can use it."
A key differentiator is data ownership and localisation. "The data is Indian specific to the sector. All these sectors can bring in the data. And this data will be Indian, will remain in India, and will be used only by the Indian Gen AI," he said, highlighting the government's vision of secure, India-first AI infrastructure. (ANI)