# INDIC OPEN MODEL LICENSE

Version: 1.0

Updated: 05 September 2026

Copyright © 2026 IITM BODHAN-AI FOUNDATION. All rights reserved except as expressly granted below.

## Preamble

This License governs use of Bodhan AI's open-weight AI models — for example, the automatic speech recognition, optical character recognition, text-to-speech, translation, and transliteration models identified in the accompanying model card (each, the "Software," as defined below) — released by Bodhan AI, the Center of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence in Education, supported by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India. This License is intended to give broad, no-cost access for research, government, nonprofit, and commercial use at any scale, including where You self-host the Software or a Derivative to power Your own product or service, whether or not that use is commercial — for example, using an ASR model inside a meeting-transcription product - with some restrictions to help us make our research and development sustainable. The primary restriction under this License is on Third-Party Hosting: giving a Third Party direct hosted or API access to run inference or fine-tuning on the Software or a Derivative requires Licensor's prior written approval. This License also gates a defined category of very large-scale product use (Section 14) and prohibits a defined set of harmful uses (Section 10). Ambiguities in this License should be resolved consistently with that stated purpose.

## 0. Definitions

**"Bodhan AI," "Licensor," "We," or "Us"** means IITM BODHAN-AI FOUNDATION, and its successors and assigns.

**"Software"** means the model weights, parameters, tokenizers, and configuration files that are made available by Licensor, together with any associated inference or fine-tuning code and documentation Licensor distributes with them.

**"Derivative"** or "Derivative Model" means any model, weights, or configuration created by, or derived through, fine-tuning, distillation, merging, quantizing, or otherwise modifying the Software or an earlier Derivative, or is trained substantially on Output of the Software.

**"Output"** means any content generated by running the Software or a Derivative, including transcriptions, translations, synthesized audio, or transliterations.

**"You"** or "Licensee" means the individual or entity exercising rights under this License.

**"Distribute"** means to provide a copy of the Software or a Derivative to a Third Party, whether for consideration or free of charge, including by making it available for download.

**"Host"** or "Hosting" means making the Software or a Derivative available for use by a Third Party through an API, hosted inference endpoint, or similar remote-access mechanism that lets that Third Party submit inputs and receive Output, or fine-tune the Software or Derivative, without that Third Party obtaining its own copy of the underlying weights.

**"Third Party"** means any person or entity other than You, Your Affiliates, and Your employees or contractors acting on Your behalf and under Your direction in the ordinary course of Your internal operations.

**"Affiliate"** means, with respect to a party, any entity that controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with that party, where "control" means direct or indirect ownership of more than 50% of the voting equity or the practical ability to direct that entity's management decisions.

**"Make Available"** means to Distribute or to Host, as applicable.

**"Internal Use"** means use of the Software or a Derivative where neither Distribution nor Hosting has occurred — i.e., no Third Party receives Output, access, or a copy.

**"Confidential Information"** has the meaning given in Section 9.

**"Eligible Public-Interest Entity"** has the meaning given in Section 13.

## 1. Grant of Rights

Subject to Your compliance with this License, Licensor grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (subject to Section 11.3, Termination) license to use, reproduce, copy, modify, merge, publish, Distribute, sublicense, sell, deploy, fine-tune, and create Derivatives from the Software. This grant does not transfer any ownership or intellectual property right in the Software — see Section 8 (Intellectual Property).

## 2. Attribution

**2.1** Whenever the Software or a Derivative is Made Available to a Third Party, You must include the following notice (the "Attribution Notice"), or a substantially similar notice pre-approved in writing by Licensor:

> "Built with [Model Name] from Bodhan AI / AI4Bharat."

**2.2** The Attribution Notice must appear in the user-facing interface of the product or service through which the Software or Derivative is Made Available or, if there is no user interface, in the top-level documentation accompanying it. It must be at least as prominent as any credit given to any other third-party model, technology, or component.

**2.3** Licensor may request reasonable adjustments to the wording, placement, or prominence of the Attribution Notice, and You must implement such adjustments within a reasonable time, not to exceed 30 days of Licensor's written request.

**2.4** This Section 2 does not apply to Internal Use.

**2.5** No removal or alteration. You must not remove, obscure, alter, or rewrite the Attribution Notice or any copyright or proprietary notice included in the Software, and must not omit or misattribute the authorship or origin of the Software in any Derivative, product documentation, model card, or publication, however the Software or Derivative is made available.

## 3. Third-Party Hosting

**3.1** Approval required. Except as set out in this Section 3, You must obtain Licensor's prior written approval, and enter into a separate written commercial agreement with Licensor on terms to be agreed, before You Host the Software or a Derivative for a Third Party.

**3.2** Exclusions. The following are not Hosting and do not require approval under this Section 3:

- merely relaying or proxying a Third Party's requests to an instance of the Software or Derivative that is hosted elsewhere by a party who holds any approval required under this Section 3; or
- providing a product or service in which the Software or Derivative is used solely as an internal component, where no Third Party is given direct access to the model's inference or fine-tuning interface, its inputs, or its raw Output as such (as distinct from the product's own outputs).

**3.3** Carve-outs. Approval under this Section 3 is not required for:

- Internal Use;
- Hosting by, or exclusively for the benefit of, an Eligible Public-Interest Entity (Section 13), for that entity's own charitable, governmental, or academic purpose; or
- Hosting that qualifies for the Open-Release Waiver (Section 4).

**3.4** Response to requests. Licensor will use reasonable efforts to respond in writing to a good-faith request for approval under this Section 3 within 30 business days of receiving all information it reasonably requires to evaluate the request.

**3.5** Anti-circumvention. You must not structure a transaction, corporate arrangement, or contractual chain (including through an Affiliate, reseller, or intermediary) with the purpose or effect of avoiding the approval requirement in Section 3.1.

## 4. Open-Release Waiver

*This Section 4 waives the Hosting approval requirement in Section 3.1.*

**4.1** Waiver. You are not required to obtain approval under Section 3.1 for Hosting a Derivative if, within 90 days of first Hosting that Derivative for any Third Party, You publicly release that Derivative — in substantially the same form and with substantially the same capabilities as the Hosted version — under this License, and You keep that public release available and current with the Hosted version for as long as You continue Hosting it.

**4.2** Anti-circumvention. The waiver in Section 4.1 does not apply, and approval under Section 3.1 is required, if the version You publicly release is deliberately degraded, restricted, or made materially less capable than the version You Host — whether by withholding weights, fine-tuning data, adapters, capability, or performance — such that its measured performance on standard, publicly documented benchmarks for the Software's task (for example, word error rate for speech recognition, or BLEU or a comparable metric for translation) is materially worse than the Hosted version's performance on the same benchmarks, allowing for ordinary measurement variance.

## 5. Derivative Works Carry This License

**5.1** If You Make Available a Derivative to a Third Party (by Distribution or Hosting), it must be licensed under this exact License. You must not rewrite, replace, or represent the Derivative as being offered under different or modified license terms, and must not sublicense it under any alternative license.

**5.2** This Section 5 does not apply to Derivatives used only for Internal Use.

**5.3** Distribution of unmodified Software. If You Distribute the Software itself (not a Derivative) to a Third Party, You must include an unaltered copy of this License with it - it must be licensed under this exact License.

## 6. No Nationality- or Revenue-Based Conditions

Licensor does not condition any right granted under this License on Your nationality, domicile, revenue, or user base. The obligation in Section 3 turns on whether You Host the Software or a Derivative for a Third Party, and the obligation in Section 5 turns on whether You Make Available a Derivative to a Third Party — not on who You are or how large Your use is, except as expressly set out in Section 13 (Eligible Public-Interest Entity) and Section 14 (Large-Scale Product Use).

## 7. Fine-Tuning and Distillation

You may fine-tune, distill, quantize, and otherwise modify the Software without restriction for Internal Use. Obligations under this License attach only once a Derivative is Made Available to a Third Party, as set out in Sections 2, 3, 5, and 9.

## 8. Intellectual Property; Reservation of Rights

**8.1** Reservation of rights. Licensor retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Software, including all associated intellectual property rights. Except for the rights expressly granted in Section 1, no other rights or licenses are granted, whether by implication, estoppel, or otherwise.

**8.2** No adverse IP claims. You must not apply for, obtain, or assist a Third Party in applying for or obtaining, any patent, copyright registration, trademark, design registration, or other intellectual property right over the Software, or over any Derivative to the extent it incorporates the Software's original weights, architecture, or training methodology, where doing so would restrict or interfere with Licensor's or any other licensee's rights under this License.

**8.3** This Section 8 does not prevent You from seeking intellectual property protection for a genuinely separate invention or work that You create using the Software as a tool (for example, a new application, method, or product feature), provided that protection does not extend to, and does not block others' lawful use of, the Software itself.

**8.4** Trademarks. This License does not grant You any right to use Licensor's, AI4Bharat's, or IIT Madras's names, logos, or trademarks, except as required by the Attribution Notice in Section 2, and You must not use them in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation without Licensor's prior written approval.

More generally, You must not state or imply that Licensor endorses, certifies, sponsors, or is affiliated with Your product or service, beyond the Attribution Notice required by Section 2, without Licensor's prior written approval.

**8.5** No circumvention of technical measures. You must not disable, remove, or attempt to circumvent any usage-restriction, safety-filter, or watermarking mechanism that Licensor embeds in the Software, except to the extent necessary for legitimate accessibility, security research, or interoperability purposes that do not defeat the mechanism's overall purpose.

## 9. Confidentiality

**9.1** "Confidential Information" means any non-public technical information relating to the Software that Licensor discloses to You outside of the public release on Hugging Face or another public repository — for example, unreleased source code, training data or data pipelines, evaluation methodology, or internal documentation — whether disclosed under this License or in connection with a request or approval under Section 3. It excludes information that is or becomes publicly available through no fault of Yours, or that You already lawfully possessed without an obligation of confidentiality.

**9.2** You must protect Confidential Information with reasonable care, use it only to exercise Your rights under this License or an applicable commercial agreement with Licensor, and must not disclose it to any Third Party. Without limiting the foregoing, You must not provide Confidential Information to any Third Party for the purpose of developing a model or product that competes with the Software.

**9.3** This Section 9 survives termination of this License indefinitely for information that qualifies as a trade secret, and for 3 years for other Confidential Information.

## 10. Prohibited Uses

Regardless of whether Your use is otherwise licensed, exempt, or free of charge under this License — including use by an Eligible Public-Interest Entity — You must not use the Software, any Derivative, or any Output to:

- generate child sexual abuse material or any content that sexualizes minors;
- develop, market, or facilitate the development of weapons, including conventional weapons or chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons;
- conduct mass surveillance or build social-scoring systems;
- generate or disseminate disinformation, including for the purpose of election manipulation;
- make discriminatory automated decisions that materially affect a person's legal rights or access to essential services, without meaningful human oversight;
- impersonate a real, identifiable person's voice, image, or likeness without that person's consent, or otherwise generate non-consensual synthetic media of a real, identifiable person;
- power robocalls, auto-dialers, voice-phishing ("vishing"), or other fraudulent or deceptive automated calling or messaging campaigns; or
- power an AI companion product marketed or designed to simulate or encourage an exclusive romantic or intimate relationship, or to foster emotional dependency — provided that companionship, wellness, eldercare, mental-health-support, and language-learning products are excluded from this clause unless they are designed to simulate an exclusive romantic or intimate relationship.

Licensor may update or expand this list from time to time to address new or emerging misuse patterns that are materially similar in kind to those set out above (as updated, the "Prohibited Uses Policy"). Licensor will give at least 30 days' public notice of any update — for example, by posting the revised list in the Software's Hugging Face repository or at http://bodhan.ai — before it takes effect. An update applies to Your use of the Software and any Derivative from its stated effective date onward; it does not apply retroactively to conduct that occurred, or a Derivative that was Made Available, before that date.

## 11. Standard Protective Clauses

**11.1** Patent retaliation. This License, and any approval or agreement You hold under Section 3, terminates automatically and immediately if You or Your Affiliate initiate a patent infringement claim (including a cross-claim or counterclaim) against Licensor or its affiliates alleging that the Software, a Derivative, or an Output infringes a patent.

**11.2** No warranty; limitation of liability. THE SOFTWARE AND ANY OUTPUT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES, OR OTHER LIABILITY ARISING FROM, OUT OF, OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE, A DERIVATIVE, OR AN OUTPUT, OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS THEREIN.

THE SOFTWARE AND ANY DERIVATIVE ARE NOT DESIGNED, TESTED, OR VALIDATED FOR USE IN SAFETY-CRITICAL, LIFE-CRITICAL, OR HIGH-RISK SYSTEMS, INCLUDING MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS OR TREATMENT, AVIATION, NUCLEAR FACILITIES, OR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND YOU ASSUME ALL RISK OF SUCH USE.

**11.3** Termination for breach.

- If You materially breach this License, Licensor may terminate it on written notice; other than for the breaches in the next bullet, You have 30 days from that notice to cure, and Licensor may not terminate if You cure within that period.
- A breach of Section 10 (Prohibited Uses), Section 11.1 (Patent Retaliation), Section 8 (Intellectual Property), or Section 9 (Confidentiality) is grounds for immediate termination without a cure period.
- Upon termination, You must cease all Distribution and Hosting under this License; Sections 8, 9, 11.2, 11.4, and 12 survive termination., together with Sections 11.5 (Indemnification), 11.6 (Compliance with Laws), and 11.7 (Data Protection) added below.

**11.4** Records request. If Licensor has a good-faith basis to suspect that You have misrepresented Your status as an Eligible Public-Interest Entity, engaged in unapproved Hosting under Section 3, or improperly claimed the Open-Release Waiver under Section 4, Licensor may request, and You must provide within a reasonable time, records reasonably sufficient to confirm or refute that suspicion. This Section 11.4 does not create a general audit right.

**11.5** Indemnification. You must defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Licensor and its affiliates, officers, employees, and agents from and against any third-party claim, liability, damage, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to Your use of the Software or a Derivative, Your breach of this License, or Your Output, except to the extent caused by Licensor's breach of this License.

**11.6** Compliance with Laws; Export Control. You are solely responsible for Your compliance with all applicable laws and regulations in Your use of the Software, including export control and economic sanctions laws of India, the United States, the European Union, and any other applicable jurisdiction. You must not, directly or indirectly, export, re-export, or make the Software or a Derivative available to any person, entity, or destination restricted or prohibited under such laws.

**11.7** Data Protection. If You process personal data using the Software or a Derivative, You are solely responsible for complying with applicable data protection and privacy laws (including India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, where applicable) and for obtaining any consents necessary for that processing. Licensor does not process personal data on Your behalf merely by making the Software available.

## 12. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

**12.1** This License is governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

**12.2** Any dispute arising out of or relating to this License, including its interpretation, breach, or termination, will be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, seated in Chennai, conducted in English, before a sole arbitrator appointed by mutual agreement of the parties.

**12.3** Nothing in this Section 12 prevents either party from seeking interim or injunctive relief from a court of competent jurisdiction, including to restrain an actual or threatened breach of Section 8 (Intellectual Property) or Section 9 (Confidentiality).

## 13. Eligible Public-Interest Entity

**13.1** "Eligible Public-Interest Entity" means:

- a government department, ministry, agency, or public sector undertaking, whether in India or elsewhere;
- a Section 8 company under the Companies Act, 2013, a registered trust or society, an entity with 501(c)(3) status under U.S. law, or an entity with materially equivalent nonprofit status under the law of its jurisdiction, in each case using the Software or a Derivative solely in furtherance of that entity's charitable or public purpose; or
- an accredited academic or research institution, using the Software or a Derivative for research or educational purposes.

**13.2** An entity does not qualify under this Section 13 to the extent it is acting as a proxy, shell, or pass-through for a commercial actor that would not itself qualify, or to the extent its use is for that commercial actor's benefit rather than the entity's own charitable, governmental, or academic purpose.

**13.3** Licensor may request records under Section 11.4 to confirm eligibility under this Section 13.

## 14. Large-Scale Product Use

If Your own product or service — other than through Third-Party Hosting under Section 3 — is powered by the Software or a Derivative and exceeds 500 million monthly active users or US$250 million in annual revenue, You must obtain a separate license from Licensor. This Section 14 does not apply to Eligible Public-Interest Entities.

## 15. General Provisions

**15.1** Entire agreement. This License is the entire agreement between You and Licensor regarding the Software, and supersedes any prior agreements regarding the Software, except a separate written agreement under Section 3 or 14.

**15.2** Severability. If any provision of this License is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full effect, and the unenforceable provision will be replaced with an enforceable provision that most closely reflects its intent.

**15.3** No waiver. Licensor's failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of its right to do so later.

**15.4** Assignment. You may not assign this License without Licensor's written consent, except to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all of Your assets; Licensor may freely assign this License.

**15.5** Updates to this License. Licensor may publish future versions of this License for new releases of the Software; a specific release of the Software remains governed by the version of this License under which it was first published, unless You elect to adopt a later version.

**15.6** Notices. Notices to Licensor under this License, including any request for approval under Section 3, must be in writing and sent to support@bodhan.ai.

**15.7** Precedence. If You and Licensor enter into a separate written commercial agreement under Section 3 or Section 14, that agreement governs in the event of a conflict with this License, but only to the extent of the conflict and only as between the parties and subject matter of that agreement.

## 16. Scope of This License; Third-Party and Upstream Components
 
*This Section 16 addresses matters outside Licensor's control: what license terms apply to components the Software incorporates or ships alongside.*
 
**16.1** Scope. This License applies only to the Software as released by Licensor and identified in the applicable model card. It does not extend to, and grants no rights in, any other model, dataset, or component — including any upstream model that the Software was trained on, fine-tuned from, distilled from, or otherwise derived from.
 
**16.2** Upstream licenses. The Software may itself be derived from, fine-tuned on, or built using pre-trained models, datasets, code, or other components licensed by third parties ("Upstream Components"). Licensor may identify some Upstream Components in the model card or accompanying documentation, but does not represent or warrant that any such disclosure is complete or current. You are solely responsible for identifying any Upstream Components incorporated into or used to produce the Software, and for independently verifying and complying with the license terms that apply to them — including any attribution, field-of-use, redistribution, or share-alike conditions those licenses impose. Your compliance with this License does not relieve You of Your obligations under any applicable Upstream Component license, and nothing in this License is intended to override or narrow those obligations.
 
**16.3** Additional software and tools. The Software may be accompanied by, bundled with, or reference additional software, libraries, tools, or dependencies that Licensor does not own (for example, inference runtimes, tokenization libraries, or evaluation scripts) ("Additional Components"). Except to the extent Licensor expressly states otherwise, Additional Components are not "Software" under this License and are governed solely by their own license terms. You are solely responsible for identifying the license applicable to any Additional Component You use and for complying with it.
 
**16.4** No warranty as to third-party terms. Section 11.2 (No Warranty; Limitation of Liability) applies equally to this Section 16: Licensor makes no representation or warranty regarding the licensing status, completeness, or accuracy of any disclosure concerning Upstream Components or Additional Components, and disclaims all liability arising from Your use of them.

## Exhibit A — Attribution Notice

"Built with [Model Name] from Bodhan AI / AI4Bharat."

Placement and prominence requirements are set out in Section 2 of this License.