A recent AIC-IIITH research report highlighted that less that 0.2% of India’s annual CSR funds go towards innovation. This prompted a roundtable discussion of related stakeholders to brainstorm on the existing gaps and suggestions on how CSR can evolve from a mere duty to a catalyst for innovation and impact. Below are the highlights. When India’s startup ecosystem crossed 90,000 registered ventures, it became clear that innovation had firmly taken root in the country’s economic imagination. Yet, despite this explosion of ideas and enterprise, one question lingers: why are India’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds – running into tens of thousands of crores each year – not flowing toward the country’s innovators? It’s a paradox hiding in plain sight. The law already allows it. Schedule VII of the Companies Act explicitly lists technology incubators and research as eligible areas for CSR spending. And yet, less than 0.2% of India’s annual CSR corpus finds its way to startup innovation. These were the findings of AIC-IIITH’s recent research.

Prof. Rajeev Sangal discusses his reservations about open-sourcing Indic language datasets, the roadmap for Bhashini 2.0, and what he expects at the India AI Impact Summit. When Mission Bhashini was first conceived under MeitY in 2018-19, it promised to bridge India’s language divide by developing speech-to-text AI models and multilingual translation tools. The timing proved prescient, coming four years before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 which set off the global AI arms race. Today, Indian AI startups are racing to build Indic large language models (LLMs) in an effort to catch up to global tech giants. While key players such as Sarvam AI, krutrim, and the BharatGPT consortium have launched foundational AI models with support across several Indic languages, progress in this domain has been slow due to the lack of digitised, labeled, and cleaned training datasets. Since Indian language content on the internet is limited, developers have had to source language data from a variety of other places in order to train LLMs that understand how Indians actually speak or ask queries.

The Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) and the Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) organized Bahu Bhasa 2025 at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad from 6 to 8 November 2025. The event was an effort to engage with the current discourse on Indian languages from the perspectives of policy, technology and community, with the objective of bringing them in conversation with each other. The name “Bahu Bhasa” (not “Bhasha”) challenges linguistic hierarchy that privileges standardized, script-bound languages with institutional power. The event was not only a celebration of Indian languages, but a space to ask difficult, necessary questions about preservation, access, and equity in a rapidly digitizing world. In the opening remarks on Day 1, Prof. Deva Priyakumar (Dean, R&D, IIIT Hyderabad) urged researchers to move beyond academic publications to develop tools that solve real-world communication challenges. Prof. Vasudeva Varma, Head, LTRC described a “silent crisis of storytelling,” urging that India must make its linguistic heritage open, lest others define it for us.