Made in India Sarvam AI beats ChatGPT in 3 key areas: Full story in 5 points

India’s AI story is no longer limited to big global names setting up offices or data centres. A Bengaluru-based startup is now quietly changing the conversation. Sarvam AI, built entirely in India and focused on Indian users, is showing that homegrown models can outperform global giants like ChatGPT and Google Gemini in some very specific and important areas. Here is the full story explained in five points.

Made in India Sarvam AI beats ChatGPT in 3 key areas: Full story in 5 points

1) India’s AI push is about infrastructure first, not hype

The Union Budget 2026 made it clear that India wants to build the backbone of AI before chasing flashy models. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign companies that provide cloud services globally using data centres located in India. The idea is simple that if AI needs massive computing power, India wants that power to sit on Indian soil. This move has already caught the attention of global tech companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, all of which depend heavily on data centres to run AI and cloud services. Google has even confirmed plans to invest billions of dollars over the next five years in AI-focused data centres in India.

2) Sarvam AI shows what "Sovereign AI" looks like in practice

While policy support is one side of the story, Sarvam AI represents what Indian innovation can do on the ground. Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, the Bengaluru startup has built a full-stack generative AI platform designed specifically for India. Its focus is on Indic languages, Indian accents, and voice-based, on-device applications. Sarvam’s larger goal is “sovereign AI”, meaning models built in India, trained on local data, and run on local infrastructure, without depending entirely on foreign systems.

3) Sarvam AI beats ChatGPT and Gemini in 3 key areas

Sarvam AI has started making headlines because it clearly outperforms global models in three key areas. Its OCR tool, Sarvam Vision, topped the olmOCR-Bench with an accuracy score of 84.3 percent, beating models like ChatGPT, Gemini 3 Pro and DeepSeek OCR v2. It also scored 93.28 percent on OmniDocBench v1.5, performing especially well with complex layouts, technical tables and mathematical formulas. These are areas where traditional OCR tools often struggle. For everyday scanned documents, forms and mixed-language content, Sarvam’s reliability has stood out.

4) What Sarvam AI can do and where ChatGPT is still ahead

Sarvam AI is built mainly for Indian use cases. On its website, users can try AI chat, translation, voice-to-text, text-to-speech and document reading for scanned images and PDFs. It works well with Indian languages and Hinglish, understands Indian accents, and is useful for regional customer support, document processing and voice-based interactions. It can answer all your queries as well, just like other AI platforms like GPT. However, it is not positioned as a full replacement for ChatGPT. The ChatGPT remains stronger at deep reasoning, coding, long explanations and complex, multi-step problem solving. Additionally, Gemini and GPT-4 (with vision) can analyze images, videos, or audio clips, something which Sarvam AI can't do yet. It is text-only and can’t process visuals or media files yet.

5) Global praise puts Sarvam AI on the map

Sarvam AI’s progress has also caught the attention of a global tech expert. Deedy Das, a former Google professional, publicly praised the startup, saying he was initially sceptical but now sees Sarvam as having the best text-to-speech, speech-to-text and OCR models for Indic languages. He also asserted that this India-based platform offers reasonable pricing and easy-to-use website, calling it a gap that big global labs are unlikely to focus on anytime soon. Responding to this, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India’s sovereign AI strategy is delivering results, with young engineers building models in areas like healthcare, materials science and cybersecurity that will be noticed worldwide.