TLDR: Mitesh Khapra, an Associate Professor at IIT Madras, has been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI for 2025. He is recognized for his groundbreaking work in making artificial intelligence accessible to non-English speakers across India through the development of extensive open-source datasets and tools for all 22 official Indian languages, primarily through his initiative AI4Bharat.
Mitesh Khapra, an esteemed Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, has achieved global recognition by being included in TIME Magazine’s prestigious 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in Artificial Intelligence. This accolade places him alongside prominent figures such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, highlighting his significant contributions to the field .
Khapra’s pioneering work is centered on revolutionizing AI accessibility for India’s vast population of non-English speakers. He identified a critical gap: Indian language technology lagged behind English due to a severe lack of quality datasets . To address this, he co-founded AI4Bharat in 2019, a dedicated research lab at IIT Madras focused on building open-source datasets, tools, and models for India’s diverse linguistic landscape .
One of AI4Bharat’s most ambitious projects involved collecting thousands of hours of speech data from nearly 500 districts across India, encompassing diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. This monumental effort successfully captured all 22 of India’s official languages, thereby bridging the performance gap where Western AI models often falter with underrepresented languages .
The impact of Khapra’s work is far-reaching. AI4Bharat’s comprehensive datasets now serve as the backbone for almost every Indian startup developing voice technology for regional languages . Furthermore, the initiative is a crucial partner in the Indian government’s Bhashini program, supplying 80% of the data used to make digital services accessible in local languages through AI .
AI4Bharat’s innovative AI models are already being deployed in critical applications, including assisting the Indian Supreme Court in translating official documents and powering a voice bot that enables farmers to report subsidy-related issues in their native languages . Khapra emphasizes the transformative effect of this work on Indian academia, stating, “Fifteen years back, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would end up working on English problems. With these datasets available, I see a shift: now Indian students are working on Indian problems” .
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Beyond current applications, AI4Bharat is also collaborating with Sarvam AI, a startup co-founded by other AI4Bharat researchers, to develop India’s first foundation model. Khapra views this as essential for the nation’s technological sovereignty, asserting, “Unless we learn that skill, we will always be in a perpetually dependent position” . His efforts are seen as championing digital inclusivity and contributing significantly to the vision of “Viksit Bharat” (developed India) .
