EduNe Bureau
Guwahati: In a development for Assam and its linguistic heritage, the Nanda Talukdar Foundation (NTF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BharatGen, the Government of India’s flagship AI initiative led by IIT Bombay, to integrate Assamese into its large language model (LLM).
The MoU was signed at IIT Bombay by Mrinal Talukdar, Secretary of NTF, and Kiran Shesh, CEO of BharatGen, in the presence of Dr. Narayan Sharma, representing Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust, a key supporter of the “Digitizing Assam” movement.
With this collaboration, Assamese becomes the 10th Indian language to be included in BharatGen, which currently supports nine others — Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada. Launched in June 2025, BharatGen is the world’s first government-funded multimodal AI initiative designed to develop sovereign, indigenous AI models across India’s 22 scheduled languages.
Calling the development historic, Dr. Sharma said, “This is not just about technology—it is about ensuring Assamese has a future in the digital century. With BharatGen, we are placing Assamese shoulder to shoulder with the world’s major languages.”
Kiran Shesh, CEO of BharatGen, echoed the sentiment, stating, “BharatGen is about building an AI ecosystem that reflects India’s diversity. Partnering with NTF and bringing Assamese into the fold ensures that this rich language and culture are represented in the digital future we are creating.”
The inclusion of Assamese in BharatGen is the result of “Digitizing Assam,” a community-driven initiative led by NTF. Over 40 months, the project has digitized and preserved more than 2 million pages of Assamese books, journals, manuscripts, and ancient Xasipaats. This citizen-led effort, supported by volunteers, technologists, educators, and cultural institutions, is among the largest grassroots digital preservation movements in India.
Through the MoU, these 2 million digitized pages will now contribute to training BharatGen’s AI, giving Assamese a robust corpus to power future tools for text generation, translation, and conversational AI.
The collaboration marks a defining moment for Assamese, long regarded as a “low-resource” language, securing its place in India’s AI-driven digital future.
