IIT Professor Joins TIME’s List Of AI’s Top 100

India-West News Desk

NEW DELHI- Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at IIT Madras, has been named to TIME magazine’s 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. He joins global leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, but his recognition stems from his distinct focus on academic research, specifically on natural language processing and machine learning for India’s numerous languages.

As a co-founder of the AI4Bharat initiative, Khapra has been instrumental in creating open-source tools and datasets. These resources have become foundational for a vibrant ecosystem, with TIME reporting that nearly every Indian startup working on voice technology for local languages relies on his team’s data.

Khapra’s work is driven by the goal of making AI accessible across India’s linguistic diversity. Recognizing that Western AI models often fall short on underrepresented languages, his research lab undertook an ambitious project. Researchers were dispatched to almost 500 of India’s 700 districts to record thousands of hours of speech, creating a comprehensive dataset that covers all 22 official languages.

This extensive data collection and development has not only benefited startups but has also become a central part of the government’s ‘Bhashini’ mission, which seeks to provide digital services in local languages through AI. The open-source datasets are also leveraged by major global tech firms to enhance their AI models for Indian languages such as Hindi and Marathi.

Khapra notes that his work has already sparked a shift in India’s academic landscape. “Fifteen years ago, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would mostly focus on English-related problems,” he said. “But now, with the availability of these datasets, I see a shift, Indian students are increasingly working on challenges specific to Indian languages.”