What should we actually use to judge Indian foundation models?
Sarvam-105B is probably one of the most interesting Indian LLM releases so far. It was trained from scratch in India using compute from the IndiaAI Mission and released with open weights.
Sarvam reports strong results across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks and Indian-language benchmarks.
But independent model comparisons can paint a rather different picture.
For example, Artificial Analysis currently gives Sarvam-105B an Intelligence Index score of 18.
So what does “globally competitive” actually mean for an Indian foundation model?
Is the right benchmark:
A. General intelligence / reasoning
B. Coding
C. Agentic performance
D. Indian-language performance
E. Inference cost
F. Token efficiency
G. Performance per GPU
H. Performance on Indian-context tasks
Because if Sarvam-105B performs particularly well on Indian languages and local context while trailing frontier models on some general-purpose benchmarks, that isn't necessarily a failure.
It could mean we're comparing models optimised for different objectives.
So here's the question:
If you had to pick ONE metric to decide whether an Indian foundation model is genuinely competitive internationally, what would it be?