  Large Language Models (LLMs), now used daily by millions of users, can encode
societal biases, exposing their users to representational harms. A large body
of scholarship on LLM bias exists but it predominantly adopts a Western-centric
frame and attends comparatively less to bias levels and potential harms in the
Global South. In this paper, we quantify stereotypical bias in popular LLMs
according to an Indian-centric frame and compare bias levels between the Indian
and Western contexts. To do this, we develop a novel dataset which we call
Indian-BhED (Indian Bias Evaluation Dataset), containing stereotypical and
anti-stereotypical examples for caste and religion contexts. We find that the
majority of LLMs tested are strongly biased towards stereotypes in the Indian
context, especially as compared to the Western context. We finally investigate
Instruction Prompting as a simple intervention to mitigate such bias and find
that it significantly reduces both stereotypical and anti-stereotypical biases
in the majority of cases for GPT-3.5. The findings of this work highlight the
need for including more diverse voices when evaluating LLMs.
