Education to E-Commerce, Varya Brings Affordable AI Video Generation Servcie to India at Population Scale & Offers Immense Potential to Convert Text into Videos by Smart Prompting

The launch was unveiled today at a press event in New Delhi, in the presence of Shri S. Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, alongside Avataar’s leadership team

Varya has been designed for India’s many contexts, not a generalized idea of India. The model has been built to understand and generate culturally rich visual outputs across India’s regions, festivals, communities, food, clothing, public spaces and everyday life. From a teacher creating a visual lesson in a village classroom, to an MSME creating product ads, to a citizen accessing public information through video, Varya aims to turn a simple idea into a moving story.

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 that led to Varya, highlighting how public AI infrastructure can accelerate homegrown innovation.

As video becomes the primary medium for learning, commerce, communication and storytelling, the ability to generate high-quality video content efficiently is becoming increasingly important.

Developed with support from the IndiaAI Mission, Varya uses a distillation technique that reduces video generation from 50 steps to 4 steps, while maintaining comparable output quality. According to Avataar’s internal inference-cost benchmarks, Varya can generate video at ₹0.48 per second, making it upto 10x more cost-efficient than several leading global video models.

The product experience is designed around a simple promise: Idea → Video → Story. Users can type an idea, upload an image, generate a video, and continue the story through additional clips. One prompt can become a lesson, an ad, a guide, a film or a memory.

For India, where AI must work not just for millions but for more than a billion people, efficiency is not a technical detail. It is the foundation for inclusion.

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 will also publish a technical report outlining Varya’s model architecture, distillation methodology and 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 that “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 build defensible IP-led capabilities. The company is focused on applying AI to real-world business and consumer use cases across high-growth markets.

What is Distilled Video Generation

Distilled video generation is a model compression technique from machine learning where a compact “student” model replicates the outputs of a larger, slower “teacher” model transferring capabilities while eliminating redundant computation. Standard video models iterate through over 50 noisy steps before producing clean output; distillation teaches the student to skip most steps and deliver the same quality in just a few iterations.Varya applies this breakthrough to video for the first time in India making frontier-quality video generation affordable, fast and accessible at population scale.(PIB)