IIT Madras-backed AI4Bharat has launched the Indic LLM Arena, a crowd-sourced platform to evaluate global LLMs built for Indian users. The leaderboard aims to set a standard for how AI systems understand, respond, and behave across India’s many languages and cultural contexts.
Existing global leaderboards are largely English-centric, often ignoring how models perform on Indian languages or code-mixed inputs such as Hinglish or Tanglish. The Indic LLM Arena fills that gap by testing AI models across three pillars—language, context, and safety.
It measures whether a model can understand how Indians speak and switch languages, whether it can respond appropriately in local contexts, and whether it adheres to India’s social sensitivities and fairness norms.
The initiative comes as India accelerates its sovereign AI efforts under the IndiaAI Mission. AI4Bharat hopes the leaderboard will serve as a trusted benchmark to assess the quality and readiness of domestic and international LLMs for Indian use cases.
The platform uses a human-in-the-loop system. Users can type, speak, or transliterate prompts in Indian languages, receive responses from two anonymous AI models, and choose which one performs better. Thousands of such human votes will feed into statistically robust rankings, helping identify the most effective LLMs for India.
AI4Bharat says the Arena is not just a leaderboard but a “public utility” for the country’s AI ecosystem. Developers can benchmark and refine Indic models, enterprises can select the best-fit AI for their needs, and users can help define what “good” AI should look like for India.
The team plans to expand the platform to evaluate multimodal models—those that handle text, images, and audio—as well as agentic tasks like search, document reading, and tool use. Everything, they say, will remain open-source.
The project was supported by Google Cloud during its initial phase. Users can try the platform at arena.ai4bharat.org.
AI researcher and founder of CognitiveLabs, Adithya S K, praised the effort, saying, “The UX is spot on and I had the best Kannada typing experience. These are the sort of efforts labs in India should be doing more across domains.”
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