Nilekani commits second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat
Bengaluru: Infosys cofounder and chairman
Nandan Nilekani
committed a second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat—an open-source initiative at IIT Madras that is building foundational AI models for Indian languages.
Its work spans speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, and language understanding for all major Indian languages.
In 2020, Nilekani saw the transformative potential of AI in Indian languages. Nilekani-founded EkStep Foundation and AI4Bharat began investing in language digitisation, data infrastructure, and early models tailored to Indian linguistic diversity. Applications were built within weeks of ChatGPT's release, ranging from chatbots in regional languages to integrations in governance and education.
AI4Bharat's models became the underlying infrastructure for this deployment.
AI4Bharat has become the language backbone of India's AI stack. Its open-source speech, translation, and text-to-speech models now power key public digital platforms.
Bhashini, India's national language platformunder the IndiaAI Mission, has adopted AI4Bharat's models to scale multilingual services across governance, healthcare, and finance.
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The Supreme Court's SUVAS system translates judgments into regional languages. Agricultural chatbots like Kisan e-Mitra use these models to deliver real-time information to farmers. AI4Bharat's language datasets—meticulously collected in all 22 constitutionally recognised Indian languages—have been released as public goods, openly available for use through the AI4Bharat website and integrated into AIKosh, India's open AI repository.
"Inclusion begins with access—and for Bharat, that means language," said Nilekani. "AI4Bharat is building the infrastructure that ensures every AI divide, the vision of 'AI for All' is extremely relevant for our country. Indians can access digital services in the language they speak."
Prof V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, said, "With the growing need for Bharat-specific AI models and also reducing the possibility of a potential.
The 2022 grant established the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, supported by EkStep Foundation. Over three years, this effort demonstrated how to build population-scale, high-quality, and open-source language infrastructure through community participation and scientific rigour.
"I strongly believe that India can be the use case capital of AI in the world," said Nilekani. "With our DPI foundation, we can build better AI, and in turn, AI can turbocharge DPI. Our belief is that AI should be inclusive, not extractive. It should amplify every human being's potential. That's our vision of AI for the people—AI to make lives better, AI to amplify human potential. People plus AI is how we hope to leverage AI and actually make it work for people at scale."
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