New Delhi: Varya, an indigenous AI-powered video generation model developed by Avataar with support from the IndiaAI Mission, has been launched with the aim of making frontier video AI affordable, accessible and relevant for India’s next generation of users.
Unveiled at a press event in New Delhi, Varya claims to significantly reduce video generation time while maintaining quality, enabling users across education, commerce and public services to transform simple ideas into engaging visual stories.
The launch took place in the presence of S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, alongside Avataar’s leadership team.
Developed by Avataar, an AI-native transformation company, Varya has been designed specifically for India’s diverse cultural and social contexts rather than a generalized representation of the country.
The model is built to understand and generate culturally rich visual outputs across regions, festivals, communities, food, clothing, public spaces and everyday life.
From a teacher creating visual lessons in a village classroom to an MSME producing product advertisements or a citizen accessing public information through videos, Varya aims to convert simple ideas into compelling moving stories through AI-powered video generation.
Avataar was among the companies selected by the IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundation AI capabilities.
Access to subsidized national AI compute infrastructure enabled the research behind Varya, highlighting how public AI infrastructure can accelerate homegrown innovation.
As video increasingly becomes the primary medium for learning, commerce, communication and storytelling, efficient high-quality video generation is becoming more important.
According to the company, Varya addresses this need by using a distillation technique that reduces video generation from 50 steps to just four steps while maintaining comparable output quality.
Based on Avataar’s internal inference-cost benchmarks, Varya can generate video at ₹0.48 per second, making it up to ten times more cost-efficient than several leading global video models.
The platform is built around a straightforward workflow: Idea → Video → Story. Users can enter a text prompt, upload an image, generate a video and extend the narrative through additional clips. A single prompt can evolve into a lesson, advertisement, guide, film or memory.
For a country where AI solutions must serve more than a billion people, the company believes efficiency forms the foundation for inclusion, making Varya an important step toward population-scale AI adoption.
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Varya Reflects India’s AI Ambition
Speaking at the launch, Secretary S. Krishnan said: “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. It is a proud moment that reflects our commitment to building indigenous AI capabilities and fostering a vibrant deep-tech ecosystem.
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.”
Avataar also announced that it will publish a technical report detailing Varya’s model architecture, distillation methodology and performance benchmarks.
Affordable AI Through Varya Innovation
Speaking at the launch, CEO and Co-Founder of Avataar Sravanth Aluru said: “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.”
He further emphasized: “Affordable AI is inclusive AI, and 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.
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.”
About Avataar
Avataar is an AI-native transformation company building domain-specialized AI products that help enterprises drive efficiency, unlock new operating models and develop IP-led capabilities.
The company focuses on applying AI to practical business and consumer use cases across high-growth markets.
What Is Distilled Video Generation?
Distilled video generation is a machine learning model compression technique in which a compact “student” model learns to replicate the outputs of a larger and slower “teacher” model while eliminating redundant computation.
Conventional video models typically require more than 50 iterative steps before producing clean output, whereas distillation enables the student model to skip most of these steps and achieve similar quality in only a few iterations.
According to the company, Varya applies this approach to video generation in India, making frontier-quality AI video creation faster, more affordable and accessible at population scale.
