Govt invested in indigenous AI models to tackle bias: MeitY Secretary

New Delhi: S Krishnan, Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Tuesday said that the government has invested in developing indigenous and sovereign artificial intelligence models to address concerns related to bias and to ensure that India has AI systems primarily trained on Indian data.

Emphasising that India must retain control over the functioning of AI models, he stated that sovereignty is a critical issue. “India needs to have AI models where nobody else has the kill switch, and it is always with us,” Krishnan said. He was speaking at a session during the AI Impact Summit.

Initially, there was debate over whether India should invest in creating its own indigenous or sovereign AI models—given the high cost and time involved. After extensive discussion, India decided to proceed with developing its own models for several important reasons.

“Making sure that we have models which are based primarily on Indian data—and data created in a multiplicity of Indian languages—is very critical."

The second key reason, he said, is India’s immense linguistic diversity, as people prefer to access AI in their native languages.

“It is important to have voice-first and voice-to-text models emerging from India,” Krishnan noted.

India’s sovereign AI initiative is BharatGen. Launched in October 2024, BharatGen is a government project aimed at developing a sovereign AI model that provides services such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for Indian languages.