Mitesh Khapra, an associate professor at IIT Madras, has earned global recognition by securing a spot on TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI. While most names on the list represent global tech giants, Khapra stood out for a very different reason he is building AI for the millions of Indians who don’t speak English.
TIME placed him alongside global leaders like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (xAI), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta). But unlike them, Khapra isn’t building commercial tools he is making open-source AI accessible in 22 Indian languages.
Mitesh Khapra co-founded AI4Bharat, a research lab focused on bridging India’s digital language gap. He believes Indian languages often lag behind in tech due to the lack of quality datasets. To fix this, his team collected thousands of hours of speech data from nearly 500 districts across India. These datasets include voices from all backgrounds rural, urban, educated, and underserved helping build tools that truly represent the country’s diversity.
AI4Bharat’s work now powers most Indian startups building voice-based tech. Their tools also contribute 80% of the language data used in the government’s Bhashini initiative, which brings digital services to citizens in local languages. Their models help the Supreme Court translate official documents and power voice bots for farmers, letting them report subsidy issues in their own dialects.
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Khapra holds a PhD from IIT Bombay and worked at IBM Research India before joining IIT Madras. He’s received awards from Google, Microsoft, and IBM, and regularly publishes at top conferences like ACL, NeurIPS, and AAAI. His work shows how AI can serve not just markets, but people in their own language.
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