BharatGen Adds Bankers, Generals & A Google Engineer To Advisory Board As Its AI Models Near Wider Use
BharatGen, the government-backed AI company, has formed an eight-member advisory board of finance, technology, policy and defence leaders, including NSE’s Ashish Chauhan and two former military deputy chiefs. The board will advise on adoption and governance as its Param2 models move into wider use, but it has no decision powers.
BharatGen Adds Bankers, Generals & A Google Engineer To Advisory Board As Its AI Models Near Wider Use |
BharatGen, the government-backed company building AI models for India, has formed an eight-member advisory board of leaders from finance, technology, policy, academia and the armed forces. The board will advise on technology, adoption and governance as the company moves from building models to deploying them, BharatGen said on Monday.
Who is on the board
The members are
1. Ashish Chauhan, MD and CEO of the National Stock Exchange.
2. Debjani Ghosh, distinguished fellow at NITI Aayog and chief architect of its Frontier Tech Hub;
3. Dipak Gupta, former MD and CEO of Kotak Mahindra Bank and professor of practice at IIT Bombay;
4. Girija Narlikar, director of engineering for Google Workspace;
5. Jaynarayan Lala, former senior principal technical fellow at Raytheon;
6. Kiran Deshpande, former CEO of Tech Mahindra;
7. Lt Gen Rakesh Kapoor (retd), former Deputy Chief of Army Staff; and
8. Vice Admiral Raman Puri (retd), former Deputy Chief of Naval Staff.
Why this mix
BharatGen says the choice reflects the sectors where it expects use: governance, financial services, education, healthcare and cultural preservation. CEO Rishi Bal said building sovereign AI "requires more than strong models" and requires understanding how technology works inside India's institutions. Chauhan said the board is excited to help the team take its work further, comparing it to India's markets and payments systems, which he said show that technology built here can work at scale. The presence of former military chiefs suggests an interest in security-sensitive deployments, though the company hasn't said whether it is working on defence applications.
What the board will do
The board is advisory. The company hasn't said how often it will meet, how long members will serve or whether they will be paid. It has no stated power to approve or block decisions.
Where BharatGen stands
BharatGen began in September 2024 at IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems, with funding from the Department of Science and Technology and the IndiaAI Mission.
The IndiaAI Mission allocated Rs. 988.6 crore to the project, while another report cites a larger figure, so the total is not settled. Its models include Param2, a 17-billion-parameter model covering 22 Indian languages and English, the Shrutam2 speech-to-text and Sooktam2 text-to-speech models, and Patram, a vision-language model for Indian documents. The company describes them as built from scratch.
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