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News Release

2026/07/02

NII Concludes a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and BharatGen Technology Foundation on the Research and Development of Large Language Models

　The National Institute of Informatics (NII; Director-General: Sadao Kurohashi; Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), a research institute under the Inter-University Research Institute Corporation Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS), has concluded a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the research and development of large language models (LLMs) with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay)^{[Note
1]} and BharatGen Technology Foundation (BTF)^{[Note 2]}, effective July 1, 2026. The MoU is referenced in the Japan-India Joint Statement ^[*1] issued on the occasion of the Japan-India Summit Meeting, as part of the two countries' cooperation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Through its Research and Development Center for Large Language Models (LLMC) ^[*2] and the LLM-jp project^[*3], NII advances the research and development of transparent and reliable LLMs, in which all components--from training corpora to models and evaluation benchmarks--are developed and released in a form fully open to researchers. The development of such open foundation models which disclose their training processes and constituent elements, is of growing importance for the scientific verification and safety of AI and for building AI foundations rooted in the languages and needs of individual countries.

BharatGen is a government-funded sovereign AI initiative, building foundational multimodal large language models across 22+ Indic languages, including text, speech, and document vision. It is run by the BharatGen Technology Foundation (BTF), and its mission is to build an open, inclusive AI ecosystem that reflects India's linguistic diversity and socio-economic realities. The initiative is spearheaded by IIT Bombay and includes IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore, and IIIT Delhi.

Both Japan and India pursue the establishment of open and sovereign AI foundations through academia-led efforts, and possess mutually complementary knowledge and experience.

Through this collaboration, NII will deepen Japan-India research exchange in the academically important field of LLMs endowed with scientific reasoning capabilities, and will contribute to the international advancement of open and trustworthy AI foundations and to strengthening Japan's research capacity.

Notes

[Note 1] Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay)

One of India's leading institutions of higher education and research in science and engineering. It is internationally recognized for delivering cutting-edge education and research and development (R&D) across the fields of science, engineering, design, management, and the humanities.
https://www.iitb.ac.in/

[Note 2] BharatGen Technology Foundation (BTF)

A Section 8 not-for-profit backed by India's Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the IndiaAI Mission (MeitY), building India's sovereign AI ecosystem through foundational multimodal large language models.
BharatGen：https://bharatgen.com/