TLDR: Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a towering figure in Indian Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, passed away on October 5, 2025, at the age of 63. His extensive work at IIT Bombay and as Director of IIT Patna significantly shaped the ethical AI future of India, earning him the moniker ‘Godfather of Indian NLP’.
Mumbai, India – October 6, 2025 – The Indian scientific community is mourning the loss of Professor Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a distinguished pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), who passed away on October 5, 2025, at the age of 63. His demise marks the end of an era for Indian AI research, leaving behind a profound legacy that has significantly influenced the nation’s technological and ethical AI development.
Professor Bhattacharyya was a prominent academician, serving as a professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Bombay, and previously as the Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Patna from 2015 to 2021. He was widely recognized as the ‘Godfather of Indian NLP,’ a title bestowed upon him by Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and non-executive chairman of Infosys, during the inaugural event of the Nilekani Centre at AI4Bharat, IIT Madras.
His illustrious career was marked by groundbreaking research in various fields, including Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Psycholinguistics, Eye Tracking, and Information Retrieval. He was instrumental in the creation of multilingual lexical knowledge bases such as IndoWordNet and Projection, which are considered significant contributions to the field. Professor Bhattacharyya was also the author of the seminal textbook ‘Machine Translation’.
At the time of his passing, he was leading the Natural Language Processing research group at the Center For Indian Language Technology (CFILT) lab at IIT Bombay. His leadership extended beyond academia, as he spearheaded numerous government and industry projects of both national and international importance. His work attracted significant faculty grants from global technology giants like IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, and even the United Nations.
Beyond his research, Professor Bhattacharyya held prestigious positions, including serving as the past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2016–17) and as an Ex-Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor. Born in Shillong in 1962, he completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, M.Tech from IIT Kanpur, and earned his Ph.D. from IIT Bombay in 1994.
Also Read:
- India’s Premier AI Recognition: The Unmissable ET AI Awards 2025
- Indian Competition Watchdog Highlights AI Risks, Advocates for Big Tech-Led Industry Oversight
His passing is a significant loss to the global AI community, particularly in India, where his vision and dedication laid much of the groundwork for the country’s ethical AI future.
