A team from IIITH has introduced Patram-7B-Instruct, India’s first vision-language foundational model designed specifically for complex document understanding. This landmark achievement is part of the BharatGen initiative, a government-supported program to develop India-centric Multimodal Large Language Models, funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Patram-7B-Instruct is a 7-billion parameter AI model trained on a large, diverse corpus of Indian documents. It can analyze scanned or photographed documents and respond accurately to natural language instructions, making it a versatile tool for varied applications across sectors. Despite its relatively compact size, Patram surpasses larger international models such as DeepSeek-VL-2 on prominent benchmarks like DocVQA and VisualMRC.

Arjun Rajasekar describes how pallor detection is being used by the Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS) as a non-invasive method of detecting anemia. Capitalizing on the rise of AI and the ubiquity of consumer smart devices, RCTS has been exploring AI applications to improve maternal and child well-being. One of the first medical conditions chosen for exploration has been anemia, a globally prevalent issue affecting approximately 29.9% of women aged 15–49 and 39.8% of children aged 6–59 months in 2019. These rates are even higher in India, with estimates from the National Family Health Survey indicating that over 50% of women and 59% of children aged 6–59 months are anemic to varying degrees. Such widespread prevalence poses a substantial public health challenge. Anemia is characterized by a deficiency in the number of red blood cells or the hemoglobin concentration within them, resulting in a diminished capacity to transport oxygen to bodily tissues.

Prof. Ramesh Loganathan has clarified that it is a myth that jobs will be lost due to artificial intelligence (AI). He suggested that employees in the IT sector should update themselves to new technology. He said that out of the total 10 lakh IT employees in Hyderabad, only 20-30 thousand are working using AI. He said that AI will not have any impact on engineering education. Just as civil and mechanical engineers are software employees, anyone who has completed any course in engineering can get qualified AI jobs. He said that there is currently a need for graduates in all fields, and there is a worrying situation in the construction and manufacturing sectors where there is a shortage of civil and mechanical engineers. In an exclusive interview with ‘Namasthe Telangana’, he shared several interesting facts about the impact AI will have on engineering education as well as the IT sector.