NTF Signs Historic MoU with IIT Bombay’s BharatGen to Bring Assamese Into AI

In a landmark step for the Assamese language and digital inclusivity, the Nanda Talukdar Foundation (NTF) on Tuesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BharatGen, the Government of India’s flagship AI initiative led by IIT Bombay. With this agreement, Assamese will become the 10th Indian language supported by BharatGen, an ambitious project to develop an indigenous large language model (LLM) as an alternative to global platforms like ChatGPT.

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 the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust, a key institutional supporter of the “Digitizing Assam” movement.

Currently, BharatGen supports nine Indian languages - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada.

Launched by the Government of India in June 2025, BharatGen is the world’s first government-funded multimodal LLM initiative. Led by IIT Bombay with a consortium of IITs, IIITs, and leading institutions, the project seeks to make AI inclusive, sovereign, and linguistically diverse by developing open-source AI agents fluent in all 22 scheduled Indian languages.

For India, the world’s fifth-largest economy, BharatGen is not just a technological leap but a strategic assertion of digital sovereignty. For Assamese, it marks the beginning of a new chapter — a language once overlooked in the global AI ecosystem now stands alongside the major languages of the world.

A Defining Moment for Assamese

For Assamese, long considered a “low-resource” language in the digital ecosystem, this partnership is historic. The inclusion of 2 million Assamese pages into BharatGen marks the first time the language has reached this scale of AI readiness. Speaking on the occasion, Dr Narayan Sharma said, “This is not just about technology, it is about ensuring Assamese have a future in the digital century. With BharatGen, we are placing Assamese shoulder to shoulder with the world’s major languages.” “BharatGen is about building an AI ecosystem that reflects India’s diversity. Partnering with NTF and bringing Assamese into the fold is historic - it ensures that this rich language and culture are represented in the digital future we are creating.” - Kiran Shesh, CEO, BharatGen, IIT Bombay said.

40 Months, 2 Million Pages – A Digital Movement

The milestone is the outcome of “Digitizing Assam”, a community-driven project spearheaded by NTF that has, in just 40 months, digitized and preserved more than 2 million pages of Assamese books, journals, manuscripts, and ancient Xasipaats. It is one of the largest citizen-led digital preservation efforts in the whole country, driven largely by volunteers, students, and cultural institutions. Through this MoU, NTF is contributing its 2 million pages of digitized Assamese content to BharatGen, ensuring that the Assamese language gains representation in the AI age alongside India’s other major languages. For the first time, Assamese has a corpus robust enough to fuel artificial intelligence tools and platforms that can generate, translate, and converse in the language.

Digitizing Assam – A Community Effort

“Digitizing Assam” began as a modest initiative under NTF but quickly grew into a movement of collective responsibility. Backed financially and institutionally by the Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust, the project thrived on local energy—volunteers who scanned texts, technologists who built systems, and educators who provided knowledge inputs.

This collaborative spirit has ensured that Assam’s literary, cultural, and intellectual heritage is not only preserved but now made available to cutting-edge global AI frameworks. The recognition of Assamese as a data contributor to BharatGen underlines the strength of this people-driven effort.

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