Best Indian AI Models 2026: Sarvam, Param2, Krutrim Compared

By GameDrop Staff · Nov 07, 2026 · AI · 3 min read

Sarvam AI artwork representing Indian AI models — Image: Sarvam AI

India has plenty of AI headlines in 2026, but the question most people actually search is simpler: which Indian AI models can I really use today? As of November 2026 the honest answer is mostly Sarvam. Its Indus chat app, API and open weights are live, BharatGen's Param2 is downloadable but restricted, and Krutrim's Kruti assistant is gone.

Quick summary

Usable today: Sarvam 105B (Indus app, API, open weights) and Sarvam 30B (open weights), both Apache 2.0.
Downloadable but limited: BharatGen Param2 17B, with a non-commercial licence and no public chat app.
Announced or preview only: Tech Mahindra Project Indus 8B and Gnani.ai Inya VoiceOS.
Offline: Ola Krutrim's Kruti assistant, reported gone from app stores since April 2026.
Reality check: independent tests put Sarvam 105B below leading global open models on general intelligence.

Which Indian AI models are available in 2026?

Model	Built by	Can you use it today?	Licence
Sarvam 105B	Sarvam AI (Bengaluru)	Yes: Indus app, API, open weights	Apache 2.0
Sarvam 30B	Sarvam AI	Yes: open weights on Hugging Face and AIKosh	Apache 2.0
Param2 17B	BharatGen	Partly: weights only, early checkpoint	Non-commercial
Project Indus 8B	Tech Mahindra	No public access route stated	Not stated
Inya VoiceOS	Gnani.ai	Research preview only	Not stated
Pragna 1B	Soket AI	Yes, for developers	Permissive, check card
Kruti assistant	Ola Krutrim	No, offline since April 2026	n/a

The table follows a November 4 comparison guide from Velona, which checked each model against its own model card or launch coverage.

What can Sarvam do, and how do you try it?

Sarvam's 105B and 30B models are mixture-of-experts systems announced at the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026 and trained in India. The 105B has about 106B total and roughly 10B active parameters with a 128K context window. The 30B has about 32B total and 2.4B active.

Indus app: the chat front end for the 105B model, available on web, Android and iOS. Type or speak in English or Indian languages.
API: Velona reports every verified user gets ₹100 of free credits, and sarvam-105b costs ₹15 per million input tokens and ₹60 per million output tokens before GST.
Open weights: download sarvamai/sarvam-30b or sarvam-105b from Hugging Face, or from the government's AIKosh platform.

For our deeper look, see Sarvam 105B explained and the newest release, Sarvam Prism, a 44 ms decision model.

Is Sarvam better than ChatGPT?

Not overall, and the evidence is clear on that. Artificial Analysis, as cited by Velona, scores Sarvam 105B at 18 on its Intelligence Index in reasoning mode, against 33 for gpt-oss-120B and 27 for Mistral Small 4. It does better on agentic tasks (25, ahead of GLM-4.5-Air at 21) but has a weak hallucination result on AA-Omniscience (-60). Sarvam's own benchmark page reports MMLU 90.6 for the 105B, but that is a self-reported figure.

Where Sarvam genuinely helps is voice and documents in Indian languages. Its Saaras speech-to-text, Bulbul text-to-speech and Sarvam Vision OCR are the practical reason to pick it over a global model.

What is BharatGen Param2?

Param2 is a 17B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (2.4B active) from the IIT Bombay-led BharatGen consortium. Its model card lists English, Hindi and 21 more Indian languages, a 32,768-token context and about 34 GB of GPU memory in bfloat16. The card calls it an early post-training checkpoint, and the non-commercial licence means you cannot ship it in a paid product. There is no consumer chat app.

What happened to Krutrim?

Ola's Krutrim was India's first AI unicorn, but MediaNama reported in April 2026 that the Kruti assistant vanished from the web and app stores. The Hindu BusinessLine, citing Tracxn data, says Krutrim has shifted from foundation models to AI cloud infrastructure and no longer builds Indic AI models. Funding tells the same story: Sarvam has raised about $389 million against Krutrim's $75 million.

Which Indian AI model should you pick?

A chatbot in your language: Indus.
An app with Indian voice or scanned documents: Sarvam's speech, translation and Vision APIs.
A commercial open model: Sarvam 30B or 105B under Apache 2.0.
Research on low-resource languages: Param2, mindful of its licence.
Hard reasoning or coding: a global model is still ahead.

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Frequently asked questions

Does India have its own ChatGPT-like AI?

The closest is Sarvam's Indus app, built on the India-trained Sarvam 105B model and available on Android, iOS and the web. It is not independently proven to beat ChatGPT.

Is Sarvam AI free?

Velona reports the API gives verified users ₹100 of free credits, after which sarvam-105b costs ₹15 per million input and ₹60 per million output tokens before GST. Check the Indus app listing for its current terms.