Nandan Nilekani Increases Support to AI4Bharat with Total Grant of INR 70 Crore
In a statement, Nilekani said AI4Bharat is creating essential language infrastructure that enables Indian citizens to access digital services in their native languages
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Infosys Co-founder and Chairman Nandan Nilekani has committed an additional multi-year grant to AI4Bharat, a public-focused artificial intelligence (AI) initiative at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, bringing his total funding to INR 70 crore. The announcement was made by the EkStep Foundation, which supports digital infrastructure and learning initiatives.
AI4Bharat works on building foundational AI models aimed at improving accessibility to digital services in India's 22 scheduled languages. The initiative has focused on developing speech and translation datasets, including the collection of 15,000 hours of transcribed speech from over 400 districts and the creation of a bilingual corpus comprising 2.2 million translation pairs. These are curated by a team of more than 100 language experts.
The latest funding comes directly from Nilekani and follows his earlier contribution in 2022, which led to the establishment of the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat. The initiative's models have been released as open-source public goods and are hosted on AI4Bharat's platform and AIKosh, India's open AI repository.
In a statement, Nilekani said AI4Bharat is creating essential language infrastructure that enables Indian citizens to access digital services in their native languages. He also remarked on India's potential to emerge as a global leader in AI applications by leveraging its existing digital public infrastructure.
Since the global release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI4Bharat's language models have seen increased adoption across sectors. These models are now integrated into tools for regional language chatbots, as well as education and governance platforms. AI4Bharat's work forms the language layer of India's AI stack and is used in Bhashini, the national language translation initiative under the IndiaAI Mission.
Bhashini supports multilingual digital access in public service areas such as healthcare, finance, and governance, utilising AI4Bharat's open models in speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech technologies.
The project continues to operate within an open-source framework, contributing data and tools intended for public use in India's evolving AI ecosystem.
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