Time Magazine recently unveiled its 2025 list of 100 tech CEOs, founders, leaders and other executives. The list featured prominent names like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others. One name that stood out this year was Mitesh Khapra, an Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. Khapra was recognised for his efforts to make AI accessible to millions of non-English speakers in India.

Who is Mitesh Khapra

Mitesh Khapra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the IIT Madras. According to his Linkedin profile, he has worked with Infosys and LG as a software engineer. He then jumped to research roles with Microsoft India and IBM before joining IIT Madras in 2016.
Khapra is also a co-founder of One Fourth Labs where the mission is to provide high quality education in AI at affordable prices to build a workforce capable of building AI solutions of societal and commercial value in India. Mitesh describes Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing and Conversation Systems as his specialities.

Why Mitesh Khapra is named in Time AI 100 list

As per information available on Time100 AI collections page, Mitesh Khapra recognized early on that “the reason Indian language technology is behind English is because we do not have enough data for Indian languages,” he says.

While Western models may perform well on highly represented languages like Hindi and Bengali, they are weaker on underrepresented languages. To close the gap, Khapra’s research lab AI4Bharat led a project that took researchers to almost 500 of India’s 700 districts, recording thousands of hours of voices from people with diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds to capture all 22 of India’s official languages.

Co-founded in 2019, AI4Bharat became an official partner for the Indian government’s Bhashini program, which uses AI to assist citizens in accessing digital services in their own languages; AI4Bharat supplies 80% of the data with its open-source dataset. It welcomes other developers utilizing its data for their models, too. Khapra says that if big tech companies use its data to make their models better at Hindi or Marathi, “it benefits the country at large.”

AI4Bharat’s AI models have been deployed in the Indian Supreme Court to translate official documents, and to create a voice bot that regional farmers can call to report issues with their government subsidy payments. The company’s latest project involves partnering with Sarvam AI—a startup launched by two other AI4Bharat co-founders—to build India’s first foundation model for the Indian government. Even if the model initially underperforms its Western counterparts, Khapra sees its creation as essential for the country’s sovereignty. “Unless we learn that skill, we will always be in a perpetually dependent position,” he says.

Already Khapra sees his work helping to reshape his nation’s academic research. He says that “15 years back, an average PhD student in India working on language technology would end up working on English problems,” but adds that “with these datasets available, I see a shift: now Indian students are working on Indian problems.”