Eyeing to reduce reliance on big tech systems, India unveils Sarvam AI, Gnani.ai and BharatGen sovereign models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
India has unveiled three sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) models at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, marking a significant step in its push to develop homegrown alternatives to global systems.
The initiative is part of the IndiaAI Mission, approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2024 with an initial outlay of ₹100 billion. The mission aims to build foundational AI models, large-scale compute infrastructure and public-use applications. Since its launch, over ₹1 billion in GPU subsidies have been disbursed, with more than a dozen companies selected for support.
Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI introduced two large language models (LLMs): a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model, both trained entirely in India. The larger model reportedly outperforms systems such as DeepSeek R1 and Google’s Gemini Flash on several benchmarks, using a mixture‑of‑experts’ architecture to reduce inference costs. Sarvam said the models are designed for complex reasoning, programming and agentic AI workloads.
Conversational AI firm Gnani.ai launched Vachana TTS, a text-to-speech model capable of cloning voices across 12 Indian languages using less than 10 seconds of reference audio. The system preserves tone, pitch, and speaking style and is built for low-bandwidth conditions, targeting government services, customer support, and enterprise deployments.
Separately, BharatGen, an IIT Bombay-led consortium, announced its 17‑billion‑parameter multilingual foundational model, Param2 17B MoE. Optimised for Indic languages, the model is intended for governance, education, healthcare, agriculture and enterprise applications. BharatGen will release the model and documentation via Hugging Face, enabling developers to fine-tune and deploy India-centric AI solutions. The consortium has received ₹9 billion in funding under the IndiaAI Mission, making it the largest beneficiary to date.
Industry leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, noted India’s growing developer ecosystem and its potential to shape global AI innovation. The government’s sovereign AI push is positioned as a structural effort to reduce dependence on foreign systems and strengthen domestic technological resilience.
