According to a press release issued by Avataar, the model has been developed to understand and generate visual content reflecting India's diverse regions, festivals, communities, and public spaces. The company stated that the initiative is focused on applications across education, commerce, governance, citizen services, and digital storytelling for micro, small, and medium enterprises.
Avataar was selected by the IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundation artificial intelligence capabilities. The research behind the model utilized subsidized national AI computing infrastructure to accelerate its development.
Speaking at the launch, S. Krishnan, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, described the development as an important step in the country's artificial intelligence ecosystem.
“The launch of one of the foundational models supported under the IndiaAI Mission marks a significant milestone in India's AI journey. Varya represents the kind of research-led capability building that we seek to enable,” Krishnan said.
The model is built on a distillation framework that reduces video generation from 50 steps to just four steps. According to the company's internal inference-cost benchmarks, Varya generates video at a cost of Rs 0.48 per second, making it up to 10 times more cost-efficient than several leading global video models.
“It is a proud moment that reflects our commitment to building indigenous AI capabilities and fostering a vibrant deep-technology ecosystem,” Krishnan said. “Through strategic support for foundational models, we are enabling innovation at scale and creating the building blocks for the next generation of AI solutions. We look forward to further strengthening India's AI capabilities and advancing frugal innovation that is both world-class and accessible at population scale.”
Sravanth Aluru, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Avataar, said India's artificial intelligence future would be shaped not only by the largest models but also by the most efficient ones.
“India's AI opportunity will not be defined only by the largest models. It will also be defined by the most efficient models. Varya demonstrates that frontier-quality video AI can be made dramatically more efficient and accessible. For a country of 1.4 billion people, affordability is not a feature, it is a prerequisite. We believe the next billion stories, lessons, advertisements, services and experiences will be created through AI, and those capabilities must be available to everyone, not just a few,” Aluru said.
The platform operates through a workflow in which users enter text prompts or upload images to generate video clips. Users can also extend generated content through additional video sequences.
Avataar said it will publish a detailed technical report outlining the model's architecture, distillation methodology, and performance benchmarks.
Highlighting the broader significance of the project, Aluru said affordability remains central to large-scale adoption of artificial intelligence technologies.
“Affordable AI is inclusive AI. What Avataar is building with Varya is important because it shifts the conversation from AI capability alone to AI accessibility. India has the talent, the market depth and the imagination to build AI products for population-scale use,” Aluru said. “Varya is a strong example of how Indian companies can compete globally, not by simply building bigger models, but by building more efficient, context-aware models that expand access.”
The launch of Varya marks a significant development in India's effort to build indigenous artificial intelligence technologies, combining cost efficiency, local relevance, and scalable innovation to support widespread adoption across public services, businesses, and digital content creation.
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