AI4Bharat innovator and IIT Madras Associate Professor Mitesh Khapra. Photo courtesy: LinkedIn
Think “Artificial Intelligence” and the only language that comes to mind is English. Of course, the first work on AI started in the West — to be precise, by the British pioneer Alan Turing — so that has long been the language of innovation in this field. But India, which is now steadily embracing its original identity of “Bharat”, wants AI developed for the specific needs of Indic languages (aka Indo-Aryan languages).
This is where IIT Madras Associate Professor Mitesh Khapra comes in. Khapra, whose specialisation is in “deep learning, natural language processing, and conversation systems” has been named in the ‘2025 TIME100 List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘TIME100 AI 2025’ for short.
The inclusion of Khapra has created a buzz in India, because this list has global tech icons, such as Elon Musk, Founder XAI; Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI; Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia; and Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta, in the ‘Leaders’ segment.
Mitesh Khapra, named in the ‘Innovators’ segment, is a resident Indian working on a pan-India government project, which makes the inclusion special, though there are several NRI/PIO names also on this list.
A moment of global pride for India in the field of AI.
Prof. Mitesh M. Khapra, Co-founder at the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, WSAI, IIT Madras, has been featured among '2025 TIME100 AI List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence'
— Wadhwani School of Data Science & AI (WSAI), IITM (@WSAI_IITM) August 29, 2025
In its profile on Mitesh Khapra — there is one each summarising the work of selected individuals — TIME said: “In one way or another, nearly every Indian startup working on voice technology for the country’s many languages relies on the datasets of Mitesh Khapra and his team. Khapra, an associate professor of computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, recognized early on that ‘the reason Indian language technology is behind English is because we do not have enough data for Indian languages’, he says.”
On Day 1 of the #GPAISummit2023, a group of esteemed speakers and delegates started the Building Scalable Large Language Models (LLMs) session. The session started with the introduction about LLMs by Prof. Mitesh Khapra Associate Professor, Computer Science, IIT Madras. The… pic.twitter.com/uag8DKyfK8
While Western models may perform well on highly represented languages like Hindi and Bengali, they are weaker on underrepresented languages. To close the gap, Khapra’s research lab AI4Bharat led a project that took researchers to almost 500 of India’s 700 districts, recording thousands of hours of voices from people with diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds to capture all 22 of India’s official languages.
TIME100 AI biography on Madras IIT Associate Professor Mitesh Khapra
AI4Bharat was established in 2019 and then became an official partner for the Government of India’s Bhashini programme, one of the programmes under the Digital India Initiative.
The Bhashini programme is designed to help Indians access AI-powered digital services in their own languages, and “AI4Bharat supplies 80% of the data with its open-source dataset”, said TIME.
The biography said that Khapra welcomed the use of AI4Bharat data by tech giants (e.g. Meta, Google) “to make their models better at Hindi or Marathi”, for example, as that would benefit all of India.
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