AI must be safe, inclusive and sovereign for Indias future: AI4Bharat

New Delhi, Feb 18 (PTI) Artificial intelligence must be safe, responsible and inclusive, especially when deployed in sensitive areas such as healthcare, education and child-focused applications, said AI4Bharat Founder Mitesh Khapra on Wednesday.

It should work the same way for everyone, irrespective of their demographic background and their language, said Khapra in a conversation during ongoing AI Impact Summit 2026 here.

He also raised concerns from an Indian perspective on AI such as sovereignty of data used in services as education, health, among others.

“… If we do not have sovereignty, if we do not have control of what our AI is, especially AI driving critical applications in the government, healthcare, education and so on. Then we have a bit of a challenge,” said Khapra, who is also an Associate Professor IIT Madras, said.

“If we do not have sovereignty, we don’t have control over what goes into training those models,” he cautioned, noting the risks of relying heavily on foreign-built solutions.

AI4Bharat, is a research lab at IIT Madras, dedicated to advancing AI technology for Indian languages through open-source contribution.

Khapra emphasised that reliability and accuracy are critical when AI systems are used by professionals or vulnerable groups.

“AI has to be safe. It has to be responsible,” he said, underlining the importance of trust in technology.

He added that inclusivity is equally vital, with AI expected to work uniformly across demographics, languages and districts.

Highlighting the Indian context, Khapra pointed out that dialects such as Haryanvi, spoken across an entire state, deserve mainstream support alongside widely recognised languages like Gujarati or Marathi.

Acknowledging that several Indian AI models have been deployed in recent weeks, Khapra stressed the need for a long-term national agenda.

Khapra mentioned the Bhashini initiative, which aims to expand beyond the current 22 languages. He said in the second phase, Bhashini expects to capture many dialects such as Maithili, Haryanvi, Chhattisgarhi, Khariboli, and Kanoji, among others, to ensure inclusivity in India’s linguistic diversity.

He emphasised that regional collaborations will be crucial for collecting localised data, while a centralised mechanism will be needed to standardise processes across languages and dialects.

“We hope to move beyond the 22 languages and focus on dialects as well as more languages,” he said.

Expressing similarly, Elevenlabs Co-Founder Mati Staniszewski said India has a challenge of diversity of 22 languages to support from the voice perspective.

“You really need to build the architecture from the start to support it,” he said, adding that it support 11 labs supporting 11 languages currently, and hopefully the all 22 be done later this year.

ElevenLabs is a Free AI Voice Generator & Voice Agents Platform.

“We hope that the future will be different, where you will be able to enjoy all that content, all those stories, all those movies in the original language, with the right voices, the right intonation, right emotion, and that’s where the Elevenlabs was born,” he said.