By Manish Gupta
Few moments capture the global momentum around artificial intelligence as vividly as a convening of this scale. The recent India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi brought together over 500,000 participants at Bharat Mandapam, heads of state from 20 nations, representation from every major AI company, and more than $200 billion in pledged investments. It culminated in the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, backed by 91 countries signaling a shared global intent to shape AI responsibly.
At the centre of it all was a framework and a word: MANAV, meaning “human” in Hindi. Made into an acronym, MANAV has become India’s answer to how AI should be governed – it should be:
Moral and ethical
Accountable
National sovereignty-respecting,
Accessible and inclusive, and
Valid and legitimate.
This is a notion that resonates deeply worldwide. As the dust settles following its unveiling, India can now look ahead and begin laying the crucial groundwork. The nation needs a comprehensive roadmap that operationalises its goals. Dell’s AI India Blueprint, which we launched at the Summit, shifts this from vision to reality, resting on three pillars: infrastructure equity, broad skilling, and trust-building governance.
Infrastructure and Energy Gap
True AI democratisation begins with foundational infrastructure that is open, cost-effective, and within reach of every innovator and institution. India generates nearly 20% of the world’s data, yet accounts for only 3% of global data centre capacity. The Summit addressed this gap directly, with plans to expand beyond an existing base of 38,000 GPUs through an additional 20,000 units. These commitments represent the best result of public-private collaboration: government policy creating the conditions, industry players deploying the capital, and shared accountability for the outcome.
As this capacity expands, it raises a critical energy challenge. Data centres could consume 8% of India’s grid by 2030, requiring grid upgrades, renewables, and efficient infrastructure with policy support. AI creates value only when it reaches people at scale. For it to become India’s next digital public infrastructure layer, access matters as much as compute. Infrastructure must extend to startups, MSMEs, and smaller states, with clear targets GPU counts, sector allocation, and regional distribution aligned to national missions, and transparent service tiers and SLAs to democratise access.
Building AI infrastructure is only the first step; unlocking its full potential requires a workforce ready to use it.
Closing the Talent Deficit
India benefits from a young, tech-savvy population and government-led initiatives like early AI education, fellowships, and large-scale skilling programs. Demand is set to outpace supply, with millions of AI jobs expected in the coming years. At the same time, relying solely on today’s students will not be enough to meet this need.
A Bain & Company report predicts that over 2.3 million jobs will emerge in India’s AI sector by 2027, but the talent pool is projected to reach only 1.2 million. This calls for a shift from policy to enterprise-led action scaling apprenticeships, industry partnerships, and outcome-driven training that measures real productivity gains.
At the heart of an inclusive AI future lies trust, supported by India’s AI Governance Guidelines and DPDP Rules that promote fairness, accountability, and transparency. However, regulatory uncertainty remains a barrier, making it critical to accelerate AI Safety Institute-led sandboxes and ensure coordinated policy efforts to enable agile, innovation-friendly governance.
MANAV means “human,” and the AI revolution is, at its core, about human empowerment. By uniting scalable infrastructure, population-wide skilling, and agile governance under a shared national vision, India can shape a human-centered, inclusive, and robust AI ecosystem. The Summit showed the momentum possible when government and industry act in concert. The next five years will show what that partnership can build.