The Vibe 2 5G, priced at Rs 10,999, arrives preloaded with three features that no other phone maker has bundled together: the government's Sanchar Saathi cybersecurity app, an integration with Sarvam AI, and a D2M broadcast partnership with Tejas Networks.

Each one is a deliberate nod to India's digital policy priorities. Together, they read less like a spec sheet and more like a positioning statement.

Sanchar saathi play

According to a report by Fortune, the DoT tried to make Sanchar Saathi mandatory on all devices sold in India back in December 2025. The industry pushed back hard, and the directive was quietly withdrawn. HMD watched that standoff from the sidelines and drew the right lesson: you can get the same goodwill voluntarily that the government couldn't extract by force and on far better terms.
CEO Ravi Kunwar was clear that the choice remains with the consumer. That single line does a lot of work. It gives HMD the regulatory goodwill of pre-installation without the consumer backlash that a mandatory, undeletable app would have triggered. It's a politically shrewd move dressed up as a product decision.
Where Sarvam changes the equation
The more substantive bet is on Sarvam AI. The Vibe 2 5G is the first smartphone to ship with Sarvam's Indus AI assistant built in a 105-billion-parameter model trained on Indian data, supporting 22 Indic languages and capable of seamlessly switching between languages mid-conversation. That last feature matters more than it sounds. India doesn't speak in clean, single-language sentences most users slip between Hindi and English, or Tamil and English, without thinking about it. A model that can follow that fluidity is fundamentally more useful than one that can't.
Kunwar put it plainly: the future of AI in smartphones cannot be limited to English-speaking users alone. That's an obvious truth that most OEMs have been slow to act on. HMD is acting on it now, at a price point where it actually reaches the users it's talking about.
Feature phone frontier
HMD's ambitions don't stop at the Vibe 2, the company is working to bring Sarvam's AI personal assistant to Nokia feature phones as well devices used by millions of Indians who have never owned a smartphone. At the India AI Impact Summit earlier this year, a demo showed a feature phone user pressing a dedicated AI button and asking, in their local language, about government schemes and local market prices. It's a simple interaction, but the implications are significant - AI reaching a demographic that ChatGPT was never designed for.
HMD already holds a leading value share in India's feature phone market. With the Vibe 2, it is making a direct push into smartphones and expects the strategy to triple sales compared to the first Vibe.
The gamble is that India-first" isn't just a marketing angle it's a durable competitive advantage. If that instinct is right, HMD won't just be selling more phones. It'll have built something harder to copy than a spec sheet.

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