NTF Signs Historic MoU with IIT Bombay’sBharatGen for Assamese language AI
Mumbai, 3 September : In a landmark moment for Assam and the Assamese language, the Nanda Talukdar Foundation (NTF) today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the BharatGen, IIT Bombay at Mumbai. The BharatGen is the Government of India’s flagship AI initiative led by IIT Bombay to build a sovereign, indigenous large language model for Indian languages.
The agreement was signed by Mrinal Talukdar, Secretary of NTF, and Mr. Kiran Shesh, CEO of the BharatGen, at IIT, Bombay in the presence of Dr.
Narayan Sharma, representing Assam Jatiya Bidyalay Educational and Socio-Economic Trust, which has been a crucial institutional supporter of Digitizing Assam. BharatGen currently supports nine Indian languages — Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Kannada. Assamese will be 10th language that supports BharatGen. Launched by the Government of India in June 2025, BharatGen is a flagship AI program to build a sovereign and indigenous alternative to global platforms like ChatGPT.
Led by IIT Bombay, with a consortium of other IITs, IIITs, and leading institutions, BharatGen is the world’s first government-funded multimodal large language model (LLM) initiative. For India, the world’s 5th largest economy, BharatGen is both a technological and strategic push to ensure AI inclusivity, linguistic sovereignty, and global competitiveness.
Its mission is to develop AI agents fluent in all of India’s 22 scheduled languages, grounded in Indian cultural and linguistic data, and available as open-source resource.
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 has 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.
