India Advances 'Governable AI' Strategy
India is promoting a vision for "governable AI," seeking to balance innovation with accountability. The country is building practical alliances, particularly in the Global South, to develop globally relevant but locally adaptable frameworks outside of the primary US, EU, and China models.
- As the 2024 Lead Chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), India has championed the New Delhi Declaration, which, unlike the Bletchley Declaration's focus on frontier AI risks, balances innovation with risk mitigation and prioritizes the inclusion of low and middle-income countries in AI governance. - India's domestic approach currently forgoes a single, binding AI-specific law, opting instead for a non-regulatory framework that relies on a combination of national strategies, voluntary guidelines, and existing legislation like the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. This model contrasts with the EU's risk-based AI Act, emphasizing innovation and experimentation by distributing responsibility across sectoral regulators. - To operationalize its strategy, the government is establishing new national bodies, including an AI Governance Group for policy coordination, a Technology & Policy Expert Committee, and an IndiaAI Safety Institute for technical research and standard-setting. - A core pillar of the strategy is integrating AI with India's established Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), such as the Aadhaar identity system and the UPI payments network, to ensure AI solutions are scalable, interoperable, and locally relevant. - The government's IndiaAI Mission, backed by a budget of approximately $1.24 billion, aims to build sovereign capability by expanding access to computing infrastructure, including onboarding over 38,000 GPUs, and developing indigenous datasets and foundational models. - At the recent AI Impact Summit, the first major AI summit hosted in the Global South, significant investments were announced, including Microsoft's commitment to invest approximately $50 billion in AI infrastructure across the Global South by the end of the decade and partnerships between Indian conglomerate Tata Group and firms like OpenAI and AMD. - India's AI governance philosophy is articulated through seven principles, or "sutras," which include "Innovation over Restraint," "People First," and "Accountability," guiding a human-centric and development-oriented approach. - To bolster the hardware ecosystem, India joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative to strengthen resilient supply chains for critical minerals and AI, a move seen as navigating away from China's dominance in these areas while maintaining strategic autonomy.
