A Mumbai-based marketing professional has used Anthropic's Claude AI to turn a 15-year-old idea into BharatRajya, an interactive historical atlas that has now been highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the 137th edition of his monthly radio programme, Mann Ki Baat.
Created by Krishna Seshadri, BharatRajya allows users to select a year and explore which rulers and kingdoms controlled different parts of the Indian subcontinent during that period. The platform is designed to make historical information more interactive by combining timelines, maps and information about rulers and major events.
Seshadri, an engineer with an MBA who works in marketing, had been thinking about creating such a platform for around 15 years. However, he did not have the programming expertise required to turn the concept into a functioning website.
The emergence of generative AI changed that. Seshadri used Anthropic's Claude to help build the platform, working through the development process using prompts, generated code and repeated debugging sessions.
"What I lacked was the technical skill to turn any of it into something real. Then Claude came along," Seshadri said while describing the development of the project.
The project provides another example of how generative AI coding tools are lowering technical barriers for people looking to build digital products without conventional software development experience. In Seshadri's case, AI was used as part of the development process rather than simply for generating content.
BharatRajya currently maps more than 1,000 districts and allows users to navigate India's political history across centuries. Users can search for districts, kingdoms, rulers and battles, while moving between different years to see how political control changed over time.
The platform's mapping data has also been made available under a Creative Commons Zero licence, allowing students, teachers, researchers and others to reuse and adapt the material.
BharatRajya gained wider attention after Modi came across the initiative on social media around Ashadha Ekadashi. During Mann Ki Baat on Sunday, the Prime Minister discussed the project and spoke with Seshadri about how someone without a professional technology or history background had used technology to create the platform.
Modi said the initiative could help students and others explore history in a more engaging format.
The recognition brings attention not only to BharatRajya's approach to presenting historical information, but also to the growing accessibility of AI-assisted software development, where generative AI tools are enabling users without traditional coding backgrounds to experiment with and build functional digital products.
Disclaimer: This article may include information derived from interviews, press releases, public statements, research, company communications and other publicly available or third-party sources. Such material may be summarised, paraphrased or contextualised for journalistic and editorial purposes. All rights in third-party content remain with their respective owners.