In a landmark move to assert technological sovereignty and bridge the digital divide, India has launched BharatGen, the world’s first government-funded, open-source, multimodal large language model (LLM) initiative. Spearheaded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and developed by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), BharatGen aims to revolutionize AI accessibility across India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape.