Nandan Nilekani , Co-founded Infosys and is the non-executive chairman of Infosys , during Infosys awards event in Bengaluru.Photo : K BHAGYA PRAKASH / THE HINDU .
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k BHAGYA PRAKASH
Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has committed a second multi-year grant to AI4Bharat—an open-source initiative at IIT Madras that is building foundational AI models for Indian languages.
This grant is issued directly by Nandan Nilekani. After seeing the 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. That foresight meant that when GenAI models burst into the mainstream in 2022, India already had the foundations in place.
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. Its open-source speech, translation, and text-to-speech models now power public digital platforms.
Bhashini, India’s national language platform under the IndiaAI Mission, has adopted AI4Bharat’s models to scale multilingual services across governance, healthcare, and finance. The Supreme Court’s SUVAS system translates judgments into regional languages. NPCI has enabled voice-based UPI transactions in native tongues. Agricultural chatbots like Kisan e-Mitra use these models to deliver real-time information to farmers.
AI4Bharat’s language datasets 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 Indian can access digital services in the language they speak.” Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras, added: “With the growing need for Bharat-specific AI models and also reducing the possibility of a potential AI divide, the vision of ‘AI for All’ is extremely relevant for our country. I sincerely hope that AI4Bharat, with the generous support of Mr. Nandan Nilekani, will help in meeting these objectives.”
The 2022 grant established the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, supported by EkStep Foundation. Over three years, this effort has demonstrated how to build population-scale, high-quality, and open-source language infrastructure through community participation and scientific rigor. EkStep Foundation’s broader work in building digital public goods and open infrastructure laid a foundation for this initiative, helping incubate early models of public-interest AI at scale.
Use case capital
“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. We believe 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 make it work for people at scale.”
AI4Bharat is a research initiative at IIT Madras focused on building open-source AI models, tools, and datasets for Indian languages. Its work spans speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, and language understanding for all major Indian languages. By combining scientific research with grassroots data collection, AI4Bharat is making foundational language AI accessible to governments, startups, nonprofits, and researchers alike.
Published on June 6, 2025