BharatGen, the government-backed initiative building artificial intelligence models for India from scratch, has constituted an eight-member advisory board drawn from finance, technology, public policy, academia and defence, as it moves its sovereign AI models from foundational development into real-world deployment. The appointments were announced on 2 November 2026.

The board will offer strategic guidance on technology, adoption and governance. Members serve in their individual capacity.

Who is on the BharatGen advisory board

• Ashish Chauhan, MD and CEO, National Stock Exchange (NSE)
• Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow, NITI Aayog, and Chief Architect, NITI Frontier Tech Hub
• Dipak Gupta, former MD and CEO, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Professor of Practice, IIT Bombay
• Dr Girija Narlikar, Director of Engineering, Google Workspace
• Dr 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 (Retd.), former Deputy Chief of Army Staff
• Vice Admiral Raman Puri (Retd.), former Deputy Chief of Naval Staff and Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Naval Command

The mix is deliberate. Capital markets and banking leaders bring experience of running technology at national scale, Google and Raytheon veterans bring depth in AI safety and fault-tolerant systems, and the two retired service chiefs bring a defence and strategic lens on how trusted AI should be built and deployed.

From models to deployment

“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,” said Rishi Bal, CEO, BharatGen. He said the board’s experience would be valuable as BharatGen takes its work “from foundational model development to real-world deployment”.

Ashish Chauhan pointed to India’s track record with markets and payments. “India has shown, through its markets and its payments systems, that technology built here for Indian conditions can work reliably at enormous scale,” he said, adding that BharatGen has brought the same ambition to AI in just two years.

What BharatGen has built so far

The board arrives as BharatGen widens its portfolio of multilingual models built for Indian languages and formats:

• Param2, a text model covering 22 Indian languages and English
• Shrutam2 (speech-to-text) and Sooktam2 (text-to-speech)
• Patram, a vision language model designed for Indian documents

BharatGen says it is already working across governance, financial services, education, healthcare and cultural preservation, focusing on sectors where multilingual capability, cost, customisation and control over data matter most. The initiative is anchored at IIT Bombay, and its board of directors includes the IIT Bombay leadership and a director of the IndiaAI Mission. Elets CIO earlier reported on BharatGen’s MoU with IIT Bombay and C-DAC to advance sovereign AI for India’s linguistic diversity.

Why it matters for CIOs

For enterprise and government technology leaders, the shift from building models to deploying them is where sovereign AI will be tested. Questions of reliability, data control, auditability and procurement now matter as much as benchmark scores, and a board weighted towards banking, markets, systems engineering and defence signals that BharatGen is preparing for regulated, mission-critical buyers. It also fits a wider policy push on trusted data use, including MeitY’s recent DEPA for AI Training framework, and growing investor attention on Indic AI, as tracked in the Tracxn Indic AI report.

Key takeaways

• BharatGen has formed an eight-member advisory board spanning finance, technology, policy, academia and defence.
• Members include NSE’s Ashish Chauhan, NITI Aayog’s Debjani Ghosh and former Kotak Mahindra Bank CEO Dipak Gupta.
• The board will guide technology, adoption and governance as BharatGen’s Param2, Shrutam2, Sooktam2 and Patram models move into wider use.

Source: BharatGen announcement, 2 November 2026.

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