GaneshRamakrishnan

Ganesh Ramakrishnan is Founding Director of BharatGen, India’s first government-funded initiative to build sovereign AI for India. BharatGen is developing text LLMs, speech models, and document vision models across 22+ Indian languages. A key focus is frugal AI: building capable models with smaller, carefully curated datasets to make high-quality AI viable in low-resource settings.

At IIT Bombay, Ramakrishnan is Institute Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He also holds the Bank of Baroda Chair Professorship in Digital Entrepreneurship and is Professor-in-Charge of the Koita Centre for Digital Health. His research spans natural language processing, multilingual AI, statistical relational learning, and machine learning, with applications across health, education, governance, and public services.

His broader research includes DECILE, which explores ways to train capable AI models with less data and computation, and Samanvaya, a project exploring the linguistic relationships across Indian languages. Earlier work includes Sandhan, an Indic-language search engine, and Udaan, a translation platform for technical content that later became a partnership with IGNOU to expand multilingual access to higher education.

Across his research and work at BharatGen, Ramakrishnan is advancing approaches that make capable AI possible beyond the environments of abundant data and compute.