That’s why we built IndQA, a new benchmark designed to evaluate how well AI models understand and reason about questions that matter in Indian languages, across a wide range of cultural domains. While our aim is to create similar benchmarks for other languages and regions, India is an obvious starting point. India has about a billion people who don’t use English as their primary language, 22 official languages (including at least seven with over 50 million speakers), and is ChatGPT’s second largest market.

This work is part of our ongoing commitment to improve our products and tools for Indian users, and to make our technology more accessible throughout the country.

IndQA evaluates knowledge and reasoning about Indian culture and everyday life in Indian languages. It spans 2,278 questions across 12 languages and 10 cultural domains, created in partnership with 261 domain experts from across India. Unlike existing benchmarks like MMMLU and MGSM, it is designed to probe culturally nuanced, reasoning-heavy tasks that existing evaluations struggle to capture.

IndQA covers a broad range of culturally relevant topics, such as Architecture & Design, Arts & Culture, Everyday Life, Food & Cuisine, History, Law & Ethics, Literature & Linguistics, Media & Entertainment, Religion & Spirituality, and Sports & Recreation—with items written natively in Bengali, English, Hindi, Hinglish, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Tamil. Note: We specifically added Hinglish given the prevalence of code-switching in conversations.