New Delhi, February 15: India is set to mark a major milestone in artificial intelligence with the launch of PARAM-2, a 17 billion parameter multilingual AI model, at the upcoming India AI Impact Summit 2026. The model has been developed under the BharatGen programme and reflects India’s push to build sovereign foundational AI systems tailored to its linguistic and governance landscape.
PARAM-2: India’s Sovereign Multilingual AI Model
PARAM-2 has been designed to support all 22 Scheduled Indian languages, making it one of the most comprehensive multilingual AI systems developed in the country. Trained on India focused datasets curated under Bharat Data Sagar, the model is built to address governance, cultural, and administrative requirements unique to India.The system adopts a Mixture of Experts architecture, enabling it to manage complex multilingual tasks with improved efficiency. This design allows the model to process diverse language inputs while optimizing computational performance.
BharatGen: National Generative AI Initiative
BharatGen is India’s national generative AI initiative backed by the Department of Science and Technology. Over the past few years, the programme has established a strong technological base, positioning India among a select group of nations capable of developing large scale AI models domestically.Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay, a key leader behind BharatGen, described the launch of PARAM-2 as a collective national effort. According to him, the initiative represents collaboration between researchers, academic institutions, government bodies, and industry stakeholders working together to shape India’s AI ecosystem.
Public Digital Goods Model for AI Deployment
Unlike global consumer AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, BharatGen follows a public digital goods framework. The AI models are not designed as centralized business to consumer platforms.Instead, they are released as national digital assets that can be deployed locally by government departments, banks, hospitals, courts, and educational institutions. These deployments can function even in secure, offline environments, reinforcing transparency, trust, and data sovereignty.
Funding and Institutional Backbone
The foundation of BharatGen lies in the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems under the Department of Science and Technology. The mission initially sanctioned Rs 235 crore to seed the project.The initiative is now expanding with additional support from the IndiaAI Mission under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which has allocated Rs 900 crore as part of a broader national AI strategy.
With the launch of PARAM-2 at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, India aims to strengthen its position in sovereign AI development while advancing multilingual and governance focused artificial intelligence systems.
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