The India AI Impact Summit, which starts today, will focus on framing artificial intelligence as a development tool rather than a narrow regulatory or safety challenge. The discussions are expected to focus on AI’s role in healthcare, agriculture, public services, financial inclusion and productivity, while underlining India’s push for faster and more inclusive adoption built on digital public infrastructure and domestic capability across compute, models and hardware. Ahead of the Summit, Electronics and IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw talks to Rishi Raj on India’s approach to AI policy, adoption and its message to the world as the country hosts the Summit. Excerpts:
Q. How will the upcoming India AI Impact Summit be different from such summits in the past?
A. This year’s Summit will position AI as a development tool. It will emphasise using AI for better healthcare access, smarter agriculture, more efficient public services, financial inclusion and productivity gains for businesses. It will not be limited to any specific AI related challenge such as safety. It will be broader in scope than highlighting only the actions needed for using AI responsibly. The Summit will revolve around the impact of AI in our lives.
Q. There’s a view that faster adoption or diffusion of technology decides which nations are winners in the technological race rather than countries which are innovators of tech. Your views and what’s India’s approach?
A. Historically, countries that adopted transformative technologies early, whether industrial machinery, Internet infrastructure or mobile connectivity, experienced exponential gains in productivity, innovation, and global competitiveness. Rapid technology adoption is central to achieving the goal of a Viksit Bharat by 2047, because technology compresses decades of development into a few years. For India, the timing is particularly strategic. We have three structural advantages. First, digital public infrastructure (DPI) that already connects over a billion citizens. Second, an end-to-end 5G stack enabling low-latency AI-driven applications. And third, a large tech-savvy and digitally adaptive population. By using AI on top of these foundations, its adoption in India will be faster and more inclusive.
Q. How will the government ensure regulatory predictability while addressing issues related to technological innovations and their applications? What principles are guiding our choices?
A. We are building frameworks around responsible AI, transparency, and ethical deployment. Our philosophy is enabling regulation, not over-regulation. We believe innovation and safety are complementary.
Q. Over the next 12 to 18 months, what milestones should industry and citizens track to assess India’s AI strategy?
A. Our aim is to become a provider of AI services. This is backed by coordinated policy across all five layers of the India AI stack. Through IndiaAI mission, we are creating a common compute infrastructure and developing indigenous foundational AI models. These models are showing good progress and are meeting global benchmarks. Models like Sarvam are being praised by the industry and critics, as better than the most popular LLMs. At the same time, the India Semiconductor Mission is strengthening domestic hardware capacity to support long-term AI growth. Four out of the ten semiconductor plants approved under ISM have already begun pilot production. Commercial production will begin this year. We have a clear roadmap for moving from mature to advanced nodes. Companies like Arm are designing 2nm chips in India. Recently, Qualcomm also announced the ‘Designed in India’ 2nm chip. We are on track of entering the top 3-4 semiconductor nations by 2035.
Q. What will be India’s message to the world through this Summit?
A. India believes that AI should be used for: solving global problems like climate change; finding new solutions for better healthcare; and keeping the world safe from the harmful impacts of AI. Countries should move from competing on building bigger models to working together for deploying AI, to solve real world problems. India is doing this by offering common compute at around Rs 65 per hour (roughly one-third of the global costs), so that startups and researchers can innovate affordably. Our aim is to make AI a tool for economic growth, social inclusion and environmental sustainability.