Pollution Free India

mostly tweets about air pollution

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

One day people of #India will understand if they would have raised their voices against rising pollution #AirPollution they would have still be alive. Everyone seems to be just igoring the fact that the air they are breathing is poisonous

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

@OfficialGMDA @DC_Gurugram @MunCorpGurugram @TrafficGGM Please at least put in the lane markings

[Pratyush Choudhury (PC) @177pc]

Sarvam just built India's first full-stack sovereign AI stack that actually works for 1.4 billion people

Hype-chasers will miss this - but Sarvam just built something special yesterday at the IndiaAI Summit. Unfortunately, a lot of the discourse continues to miss the real story.

Let's take a stock of the state of the union first:

(1) Most people outside India (and even many inside) don’t fully appreciate the invisible ceilings we operate under here. H100 and Blackwell clusters are still not commercially stocked at a meaningful scale.

(2) US export caps haven't helped, squeezing supply even further.

(3) Indian teams literally queue for hours – sometimes days – of A100/H100/Blackwell time that US and Chinese labs get on tap.

(4) The IndiaAI Mission provides shared compute, but it comes with strict allocation queues and governance.

(5) Data is the even harder long-tail nightmare. Indic languages plus heavy code-mixing across 22 scheduled tongues form a tiny fraction of global corpora. You can’t simply scrape your way to high-quality pretraining data the way English-centric labs do.

(6) Any serious local team must first build its own corpus – months of curation, cleaning, deduplication, and synthetic generation – before the very first gradient step.

(7) Talent pipeline for HPC-scale MoE training, edge optimisation, and state-space architectures is still forming

Despite all of this, the entire effort was pulled off w/ a core team of just 15 engineers & a meager corpus of ~4k GPUs - this is a REAL feat

Yet they shipped India’s first credible sovereign full-stack in one coordinated go.
Let's take a look at what all Sarvam actually built:

(1) A 30B MoE model trained from scratch on 16T pure Indic tokens, 32k context length, ~1B active parameters per token – purpose-engineered for real-time voice conversations and agentic loops that feel completely native in Hinglish or any regional tongue.

(2) A 105B MoE model (128k context, ~9B active parameters) reaching GLM-4.5-Air class performance on complex reasoning and long-form tasks - the practical walk-phase semi-frontier model that punches far above its headline size.

(3) A 3B state-space Vision model that sets new SOTA on Indic OCR, tables, charts, and even historic Devanagari manuscripts – linear scaling that lets it handle 50-page mixed-language documents where transformers would choke on memory.

(4) Sub-350MB edge models that finally make everything truly offline and population-scale: 74M Saaras STT with automatic language ID running 8.5× real-time on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (TTFT under 300 ms), 24M Bulbul TTS with natural voice cloning from just one hour of audio inside a 60MB footprint, and 150M bidirectional translation covering 110 language pairs across 10 Indic languages + English with zero English pivot.
Smart choices everywhere that scream first-principles engineering.

They chose a proven high-sparsity MoE backbone, layered Multi-Headed Latent Attention for massive KV-cache compression wins & partnered with NVIDIA’s Nemotron co-design for both training stability (MoE reinforcement learning is notoriously unstable) & 4× inference throughput on Blackwell.

This is real pretraining plus RL solved under constraints that would make most global teams blink.

The 105B isn’t 1T-parameter fireworks, but it is the walk-phase model that actually lands on ₹8k feature phones & smart glasses.

That is exactly how you reach semi-frontier capability in 2026 w/o burning years on wheel-reinvention

Model adoption is always long-tail. You need to ship multiple non-frontier quality pieces until the one that truly owns the dimensions we care about arrives.

Sarvam just handed every Indian founder, builder, SME & policymaker a stack that actually works for farmers checking fertiliser prices in their dialect, street vendors negotiating deals in Hinglish, government departments processing 22-language documents & forms w/o any cloud round-trips, and millions more in everyday vernacular scenarios.

This isn’t hype. This isn’t nationalism. It’s recognising a genuine engineering feat under constraints that most of the world never has to face – compute scarcity, data fragmentation, talent pipeline still maturing.

A cracked team of engineers gave it their all over the past several weeks to do what many doubted as not doable in/from India - built usefully large, globally competitive models from scratch in India.

India's own AI moment is arriving & all the stuff done by this amazing team tells us, "Yes, India can & India will"

👏 @SarvamAI, @pratykumar @vivek_raghavan, @_mohit_singla, @anand_404, @kediaharshit9, @AashaySachdeva, @sumanthd17, @ArpitDwivedi100, @HarveenChadha, @rkal4, @sushil_khyalia, @ManavSinghal157, @sohampetkar, @selfawareatom, @AnnaUpreti, @MeghMakwan33973 & the rest of the team

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

One year ago the tender for Rs 8cr was floated for the same road, and within months the road is in terrible state. No lane markings, no footpaths, no end to end road. Terrible implementation and planning @MunCorpGurugram @OfficialGMDA @DC_Gurugram @CPCB_OFFICIAL

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

This is the state of Golf Course Extension Road every single night. We are literally breathing poison. The amount of dust is blinding and choking commuters and residents alike. Complete negligence! 😷🚫
Fix this immediately @OfficialGMDA @GurugramMCG @DC_Gurugram
#Gur #Pollution

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

This is the state of Golf Course Extension Road every single night. We are literally breathing poison. The amount of dust is blinding and choking commuters and residents alike. Complete negligence! 😷🚫
Fix this immediately @OfficialGMDA @GurugramMCG @DC_Gurugram
#Gur #Pollution

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Some nice updates to Veo 3.1 today, including the much-asked-for better support for portrait mode videos and more.

[Deedy @deedydas]

I was wrong about Sarvam.

When I wrote about them a year ago, I felt like the direction to train small "indic" language models was wrong. But boy, have they turned it around. They have the best text-to-speech, speech-to text, and OCR models for Indic languages, and that's actually really valuable. The pricing is very reasonable. And the website is not only beautifully designed but dirt easy to use. They're filling a well needed gap in the ecosystem and doing things big labs will probably never focus on to the fullest extent (at least in the short term). I don't know anything about the business, but there's a lot to appreciate about what they've build technologically and I can't remember the last time I felt that way about software products coming out of India. Well done.

[Pavel Svitek 🇨🇭 @pavelsvitek_]

The previews are nuts.

[Hemant Mohapatra @MohapatraHemant]

This drop from @SarvamAI is really just so good I keep going back to it! Some of these fonts are so wild, it's magical they can even be transcribed. What's next team @SarvamAI?

[Raghav Chadha @raghav_chadha]

Today in Parliament I highlighted GPU shortage as the biggest constraint in India’s AI ambition.

The bottleneck is rising GPU costs & global supply shortage. This could choke India’s data centre expansion and AI advanced model training.

India’s current compute pool has 34,000 GPUs, but a very small number compared to global scale required for training advanced models.

Today I asked in the parliament, what are the specific targets, timelines & geopolitical engagements in place to secure predictable access to advanced computing resources, in particular GPUs?

[SUHEL SETH @Suhelseth]

Well done @PradeepIAS_HR and @NayabSainiBJP : you make @narendramodi so proud. He should know what a brilliant job @DC_Gurugram is doing with such wonderful people at the helm of affairs. And yes, happy New Year too! @gurgaon_live @Rao_InderjitS

[Hiren Jethva @hjethva05]

#NASA Earth Observatory Image of The Day (IOTD) Article: New Timing for Stubble Burning in India

https://t.co/rRtkUrqXQi

@VishnuNDTV @CBhattacharji @eagle_mist @kapsology @tushar15 @siddharth3 @DilliDurAst @parthaabosu

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

@Sonal_MK
We now have an official article from NASA on change in timing to evade farm fire tracking, hope you cover it on your series.

New Timing for Stubble Burning in India - NASA Science https://t.co/FDuI3kMTjP

[Ayush Jaiswal @ayushjaiswal]

700+ AQI in Delhi. Breaks my heart to see so many of my friends & family living here. It’s impact will be devastating & will only appear 15-20 years later.

[Bharati Chaturvedi @Bharati09]

Social terrorism is a real thing. When people host dinners and events and insist you must attend, regardless of the AQI.

GRAP 4 should include cancellation of all parties, gathering, melas and restrict weddings to 50 people who love the couple enough to donate a few weeks of their lives to them.

Sit at home!

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

#Imp: Complete government negligence and apathy towards enforcing pollution measures. Read this report based on RTI findings by environmental activist Amit Gupta.

NONE of the thermal plants around Delhi are being fully monitored for pollution emissions! Without enforcement, no data. Without accurate data, HOW is the government going to take effective policy measures? @CPCB_OFFICIAL has much to answer, and so do the Ministers @byadavbjp, @mssirsa.

The government is busy creating committees after committees but on-ground action remains ZERO. Idiotic measures like water sprinklers and smog guns are being touted as "action" on Insta reels.

Link: https://t.co/TOY8dHMJFW

[Gargi Rawat @GargiRawat]

Polluted sky, polluted water #DelhiPollution #toxicAir #Yamuna

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Parliament so far this session:

Vande Mataram: 10 hours
Electoral reforms: 12 hours
Disruptions/walkouts: 40 hours

Pollution: 0 hours.

My show last night on whether the blamegames can end, and genuine joint action now happen. https://t.co/JEWFeflO63

[Bharat Chugh @advbharatchugh]

This is sad!

1.Orwell had said that, at some point, we'd be asked to "reject the evidence of our eyes and ears (and lungs)"

2. When phrases like "Synergistic manifestation of factors" are invoked, the idea, it appears, is to obscure & obfuscate; to create a smokescreen & not a windowpane, which clear & honest writing creates.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

Rahul Gandhi struck a chord in Parliament today.

In words and in tone, he drew a line in the sand on pollution, an issue that should have eclipsed every other issue this Winter Session.

My take:

[Pollution Free India @DNivasi]

@KhaiwalPGI Please read this @isro which was published just recently which clearly calls out change in timing of the crop burning to evade the satellites
https://t.co/ZHpzGTKVj2

[r_isro @r_isro]

A paper from SAC on monitoring of major source of pollution during Oct/Nov in North India, 'Evidence of shift in stubble burning timing over northwest India from geostationary satellite observations'
https://t.co/Bc5J5V5gVo