BharatGen names advisory board of senior leaders

BharatGen, the government-backed AI company building AI models for India, has constituted an eight-member advisory board comprising senior leaders from technology, finance, economics, academia, public policy and defence.

The members are:

• Ashish Chauhan, MD & CEO, National Stock Exchange
• Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog and Chief Architect, NITI Frontier Tech Hub
• Dipak Gupta, former MD & CEO, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Professor of Practice, IIT Bombay
• Girija Narlikar, Director of Engineering, Google Workspace
• Jaynarayan H. Lala, former Senior Principal Technical Fellow, Raytheon, an RTX business
• Kiran Deshpande, former CEO, Tech Mahindra and Co-founder, Mojo Networks
• Lt Gen Rakesh Kapoor, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd.), former Deputy Chief of Army Staff
• Vice Admiral Raman Puri, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd.), former Deputy Chief of Naval Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Naval Command

The board will provide strategic guidance on technology, adoption and governance as BharatGen takes its AI models into wider use across sectors. Members serve on the board in their individual capacity.

Rishi Bal, CEO, BharatGen, said: “Building sovereign AI requires more than strong models. It requires an understanding of how technology will work within India’s institutions, businesses and public systems. We have brought together people who have built and led organisations across very different fields, and their experience will be valuable as we take BharatGen from foundational model development to real-world deployment. We’re grateful to each of them for giving their time and judgement to what we’re building.”

Ashish Chauhan, MD& CEO, NSE, said: “India has shown, through its markets and its payments systems, that technology built here for Indian conditions can work reliably at enormous scale. In just two years, BharatGen has brought that same ambition to AI, building AI models from scratch for India and already putting them to work across sectors. Each of us on the board brings a different lens to this, and all of us are excited to help this team take its work further.”

The appointments come as BharatGen expands its portfolio of multilingual AI models, built from scratch for India across text, speech and vision. These include the Param2 text model, covering 22 Indian languages and English; the Shrutam2 speech-to-text and Sooktam2 text-to-speech models; and Patram, a vision language model designed for Indian documents and formats.

A key focus for BharatGen is taking these capabilities into sectors where multilingual capability, cost, customisation and control over data matter most. The company is already working across governance, financial services, education, healthcare and cultural preservation.

The board’s members have built and led institutions that operate at national scale, from financial markets and banks to public systems and the armed forces. Their experience will shape how BharatGen builds AI that India’s institutions and people can trust and rely on.