The Government of India has been pointing towards an indigenous Large Language Model (LLM) for the past few months. To recall, earlier this year, Union Minister of Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced that an AI model would be ready in 10 months, which will compete with big players, like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. But this is not it. In February, during the Paris AI Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that India is on its way to developing its Large Language Model (LLM). And now the country is taking steps to make it happen. The Government, under the IndiaAI Mission, has finally selected Sarvam to build India’s sovereign Large Language Model (LLM).
In a first-of-its-kind move, Sarvam is set to receive dedicated computing resources to develop a homegrown foundational model entirely from the ground up. As stated in the official announcement, the model will possess reasoning capabilities, be voice-centric, fluent in Indian languages, and designed for secure, large-scale deployment across the population.
The statement further emphasised that the model will be “built, deployed, and optimised in India,” relying on domestic infrastructure and crafted by “a new generation of Indian talent.” This initiative is intended to foster strategic independence, drive innovation within the country, and solidify India’s long-term leadership in the field of artificial intelligence.
India’s LLM model by Sarvam: 3 models
Sarvam, a pioneering Indian artificial intelligence company, is on a mission to build the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India and make GenAI a reality for Bharat. The company has already demonstrated proven capability in developing foundational models proficient in Indian languages. During the announcement, Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models.”
Dr Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam, said, “We are deeply grateful to the Government of India for its vision and support in advancing AI. Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country.”
Moreover, he added that as a part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, the company is developing three model variants:
— Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation,
— Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and
— Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks.
Dr Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam, said, “We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country. This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders.”
Sarvam is also collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models.
Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/
