India, July 29 -- With many homegrown foundation model initiatives competing for talent, compute and enterprise mindshare, the question of who will define the country's AI future is becoming increasingly consequential.

Enter BharatGen. Launched as a non-profit consortium anchored at IIT Bombay and backed by the Department of Science and Technology, BharatGen is not your typical AI startup.

With Rs.988.6 Cr in funding from the IndiaAI Mission - the largest single allocation under the government's Rs.1,500 Cr AI push - it is building multilingual and multimodal AI models across all 22 scheduled Indian languages. Its model families - Param, Patram, Sooktam and Shrutam - span text, vision and speech, and its open-source releases have alread...