IIT-Madras' Bodhan AI launches 4 open models to build India’s multilingual education stack- Moneycontrol.com

Developed in partnership with AI4Bharat, the models are being released as digital public goods, with open-weight versions, and hosted Application Programming Interfaces running on sovereign digital infrastructure

September 04, 2026 / 13:20 IST

Bodhan AI, the Centre of Excellence in AI for Education incubated at IIT-Madras, has launched four foundational artificial intelligence models for Indian languages as part of an effort to build a sovereign technology layer for India's multilingual education ecosystem.

Developed in partnership with AI4Bharat, the models are being released as digital public goods, with open-weight versions and hosted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) running on sovereign digital infrastructure.

Bodhan AI is a Section 8 company incubated at Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and funded by the union education ministry. It is building the Bharat EduAI Stack as sovereign digital public infrastructure for education.

The initiative is part of the broader Bharat EduAI Stack, which Bodhan AI envisions as sovereign digital public infrastructure for education.

The four models cover automatic speech recognition (ASR), optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation (MT), and text-to-speech (TTS).

The ASR model supports 27 languages, while the OCR and TTS models cover 23 languages each.

Bodhan-Translate, the machine translation model, supports 22 Indian languages.

The models are designed to serve as foundational building blocks that edtech companies, startups, researchers, universities, technology companies, and government partners can use to develop their applications rather than requiring each organisation to build the underlying AI capabilities.

“The launch of these voice and vision models is an important step towards creating sovereign digital public infrastructure for AI in education that can serve our linguistic diversity and enable innovation at scale,” IIT Madras director professor V Kamakoti said.

Bodhan AI said the models were trained and optimised using NVIDIA Nemotron open models and libraries from the NVIDIA NeMo framework for speech recognition, machine translation, and OCR. Its ASR model was post-trained from NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR to support Indian languages, including regional dialects and accents.

The models are served using NVIDIA TensorRT LLM and vLLM inference microservices.

The open approach is intended to reduce duplication across India's education technology ecosystem.

Prof Mitesh Khapra, principal investigator at Bodhan AI, said the organisation wanted to “build with the ecosystem, not compete with it”, with a common layer that can power education AI applications without institutions having to duplicate the same foundational work.

Focus on Indian-language education

Bodhan AI is also launching a student tutor bot and a teacher assistant bot.

The student bot is aimed at students in classes 6-12 and is built around NCERT and SCERT curricula. Students can interact with it through text or voice across 22 Indian languages. It uses textbook content to provide explanations, examples and assessments and can guide students through problems using interactive tools and a digital canvas for diagrams, calculations, and working.

The teacher bot is designed as an AI workspace for teachers to plan, create, assign, assess and refine classroom work. Teachers can generate lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, homework and revision material based on parameters such as grade, subject, topic, duration and difficulty. They can also upload student work for evaluation against specified marking criteria.

Bodhan AI said AI-generated material will remain subject to teacher review, with educators able to edit, regenerate or discard outputs rather than allowing the system to make automatic classroom decisions.

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