India's Big Indic Data Chase

A quiet race is on to give India its own AI voice. From call-centre automation to defence and legal systems, Abhishek Upperwal of Soket Labs and journalist Swathi Radhakrishnan tell us why AI trained only on Western, English-heavy data cannot meet India’s needs. Translation isn’t enough; models must “think” in Hindi, Tamil or Marathi to capture nuance and reduce bias. The government’s IndiaAI mission, with nearly ₹10,000 crore in funding, is catalysing startups to build these Indic models. But their biggest bottleneck is data. Only a sliver of the world’s open datasets are in Indian languages, and even public archives like Doordarshan take time to unlock. Startups are scrambling crowdsourcing voices, licensing publishing-house content, generating synthetic text and negotiating with ministries to reach the 15–20 trillion high-quality tokens needed for a world-class foundation model. In this episode Host Anirban Chowdhury, ET’s Swathi Moorthy and Soket AI’s, founder, Abhishek Upperwal try to answer the following questions: What makes sovereign, Indic-first AI critical for India’s economy and security? How are innovators overcoming the huge shortage of quality language data? Can low-cost, DeepSeek-style methods help India build frugal yet powerful models? Where will the commercial payoffs voice AI, regional apps, enterprise tools arrive first?  Tune in.You can follow Anirban Chowdhury on his social media: Twitter and LinkedinYou can follow Swathi Moorthy on her social media: Twitter and LinkedIn and also read Newspaper ArticleListen to Corner Office Conversation our new show:: Corner Office Conversation with Pawan Goenka, Chairman, IN-SPACe, Corner Office Conversation with The New Leaders of Indian Pharma and much more. Check out other interesting episodes from the host like: Why Is India Still Buying Russian Oil?, How AI is Rewriting Cinema Part 2, Trump vs Harvard: India Impact, Of Dragons and Elephants: Modi–Xi in Focus and much more. Catch the latest episode of ‘The Morning Brief’ on ET Play, The Economic Times Online, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Amazon Music and Youtube.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.