In a world where AI development is dominated by a few global powers, sovereign AI, that is, artificial intelligence developed and owned by a country, is a necessity for self-reliance. For India, with its linguistic and economic diversity, building home-grown AI solutions is of critical strategic importance.
AI4Bharat, an initiative launched at IIT Madras in 2020, exemplifies this approach. It focuses on AI tools tailored for Indian languages and real-world constraints. Unlike Silicon Valley’s compute-heavy models, AI4Bharat builds lightweight systems that run on low-end smartphones and low bandwidth networks, enabling access across the digital divide.
This is LeanSpark in action: solving large-scale problems under constraints of cost, bandwidth and infrastructure.
India is a mosaic of over 1,600 dialects and 22 official languages. In such a multilingual society, the global models of AI built for English simply don’t work. This is why sovereign AI, developed in India, is not a luxury but a necessity. It ensures that technology speaks the language of all people and not just the language of the rich.
“When ChatGPT came out in November 2023,” Vivek Raghavan says, “it simply blew my mind. Here was a truly deflationary technology in every sense of the term. Immediately, I could see a way for India to achieve huge breakthroughs in health and education. Here was an opportunity to put a personal tutor in the pocket of every Indian child, and a personal physician in the hands of every Indian adult. An AI tutor, for instance, would cost far less than today’s schools and provide much more personalized instruction.”
