New Delhi, February 15 (IANS). India is going to take a big step in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A multilingual AI model with 17 billion parameters named ‘PARAM-2’ will be launched at the upcoming India AI Impact Summit 2026.
Developed under the ‘BharatGen’ initiative, ‘PARAM-2’ represents India’s efforts to build its own sovereign core AI models, specifically designed keeping in mind India’s languages, administrative needs and cultural circumstances.
BharatGen is India’s national generative AI initiative supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
Over the years, this program has built a strong base, making India one of the few countries capable of developing large-scale AI models on their own.
‘PARAM-2’ supports all 22 scheduled languages of India, trained on India-related datasets under the ‘India Data Ocean’.
The model is based on a ‘mixture-of-experts’ architecture, enabling it to handle complex multilingual tasks better and effectively.
Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT Bombay, one of the key leaders of BharatGen, described the launch as more than just the release of a new model.
He said that this is the result of collaboration between researchers, institutions, government bodies and industry partners so that India can shape its own AI future.
Unlike global consumer AI platforms like ChatGPT or Gemini, BharatZen adopts a different model.
It does not operate as a centralized business-to-consumer service, but instead its AI models are released as national public digital goods.
With this, government departments, banks, hospitals, courts and educational institutions can use them at their level, even in a secure environment without internet. Its objective is to ensure transparency, trust and data sovereignty.
The foundation of BharatGen is based on the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems under the Department of Science and Technology.
Under this mission, initially Rs 235 crore was sanctioned. This is now being taken further with the support of the IndiaAI Mission of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in which Rs 900 crore has been allocated under the National AI Strategy.
–IANS
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