In a landmark effort to support AI research grounded in Indian knowledge systems, IIT Bombay has digitised 30 ancient textbooks covering topics such as astronomy, medicine and mathematics-some dating back as far as 18 centuries.

The initiative, part of the government-backed AIKosh portal, has produced a dataset comprising approximately 218,000 sentences and 1.5 million words, now available to researchers across the country.

Launched in March, AIKosh serves as a national repository for datasets, models and toolkits to foster home-grown AI innovation.

Alongside BharatGen-a consortium led by IIT Bombay and comprising IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore and IIIT Hyderabad-the institute has contributed 37 diverse models and datasets to the platform.

These contributions include 16 culturally significant datasets from IIT Bombay alone, as well as 21 AI models from BharatGen, which is supported by the Department of Science and Technology.

Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, who leads the initiative, said the team is developing sovereign AI models for India, trained from scratch and not merely fine-tuned versions of existing tools.

These models aim to be data- and compute-efficient while being culturally and linguistically relevant. The collection also includes datasets for audio-visual learning-such as tutorials on organic farming and waste-to-toy creation-mathematical reasoning in Hindi and English, image-based question answering, and video-text recognition.

One dataset even features question-answering derived from the works of historian Dharampal. 'This is about setting benchmarks for the AI ecosystem in India,' said Ramakrishnan, noting that the resources are openly available to researchers, enterprises and academic institutions alike.

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