PARAM 2: India’s Sovereign AI Milestone

India has taken a decisive step toward technological sovereignty with the launch of PARAM 2, unveiled by BharatGenunder the India AI Mission. The model represents a bold push to build AI rooted in Indian languages, transparent data systems, and domestic capability.

PARAM 2 is a 17 billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model engineered for 22 Indian languages, including Tamil, Malayalam, and Punjabi. Designed to leverage phonetic similarities across Indic languages, the system improves speech recognition and text-to-speech performance, ensuring deeper inclusion for linguistically diverse communities.

The initiative is led by a consortium anchored at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and supported by nine premier academic institutions. With over ₹1,235 crore in backing from the Department of Science and Technology and the India AI Mission, the project reflects a collaborative, open innovation framework rather than a closed corporate model.

A defining pillar of PARAM 2 is data provenance. BharatGen has partnered with certified vendors to collect and trace speech datasets down to the pin-code level, ensuring linguistic authenticity and full traceability. This architecture embeds ethical AI governance into the system from the ground up.

Beyond research labs, PARAM 2 is already driving real-world applications. In partnership with Amrita Hospitals, BharatGen introduced Medsum AI, a speech-to-text solution that helps doctors generate clinical summaries while safeguarding patient consent and privacy. State governments are also exploring its deployment for multilingual citizen services and policy analysis.

To power large-scale AI training, BharatGen collaborates with the National Supercomputing Mission and industry leaders like Nvidia and Larsen & Toubro, strengthening India’s GPU and semiconductor ecosystem.

By embedding transparency, observability, and accountability into its stack, PARAM 2 signals India’s transition from AI consumer to sovereign AI innovator—laying the groundwork for future trillion-parameter systems built on trust, collaboration, and national purpose.