The Invisible Gap: Romanized Indic Generation Fails Where Automatic Metrics Succeed
Hundreds of millions of Indians communicate with digital systems in romanized Latin characters -- typing "aap kaise hain" rather than native script -- yet romanized Indic generation is absent from NLP benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. We demonstrate that automatic metrics (BGE-M3, BERTScore) systematically misrepresent the quality of romanized Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada generation. We evaluate four LLMs (Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Gemini 2.5-flash, Qwen3.5-35B) on 142 OpenAssistant query-response pairs. On a 72-response diagnostic subset, native speakers rate GPT-5.5 1.43 points higher than Claude Opus 4.8 on a 12-point rubric, whereas their full-dataset BGE-M3 means differ by only 0.004. Two distinct model-specific failure modes emerge: Gemini produces script spillage (16.9% of Telugu responses leak native script), while Qwen collapses to English-only output (16.2% of Kannada responses). We introduce a failure-aware evaluation policy that assigns zero to empty outputs, script-corrupted responses, and instruction collapses -- revealing failures metrics alone cannot detect. Our results show that evaluating romanized Indic generation requires a coordinated bundle: semantic similarity, script compliance, failure coverage, and native-speaker acceptability.