ARTICLE
By- Hardeep S Puri
When Panini reduced the chaos of spoken language into a compact, computable grammar, he proved something that still holds: intelligence is most powerful when it is expressed as structure. Nalanda took that instinct into institutions, building methods to debate, preserve, and transmit knowledge across borders. India’s decision to host the India AI Impact Summit 2026 draws from the same civilisational impulse, because the next leap in technology is about systems that can learn, reason, and act at scale, and the world cannot afford a future in which only a few capitals decide how those systems are built.
Held at Bharat Mandapam last week, the Summit was the first global AI summit hosted by a Global South nation, and no previous edition drew participation at this scale: over 20 heads of state, 60 ministers, more than 500 AI leaders from over 100 countries, and 300 exhibitors across ten thematic pavilions. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, India is putting forward an organising idea of its own: sovereignty over data, inclusion by design, accountability by default. And it is inviting global capital to build here on those terms.
That idea finds its sharpest expression in the Prime Minister’s M.A.N.A.V. vision: ethical guardrails, accountable governance, sovereignty over data so that the raw material of intelligence is not extracted the way commodities once were, broad access so that the benefits reach a farmer in Madhya Pradesh as surely as an engineer in Bengaluru, and legal validity so that every deployed system remains answerable to democratic scrutiny. His formulation about giving AI an open sky while keeping command in human hands draws a line many advanced economies have been reluctant to draw.
Those principles now carry multilateral weight through the Delhi Declaration, adopted at the summit and already being called the first major AI governance blueprint from the Global South; taking a development-oriented view, anchored in a techno-legal approach that favours flexible guardrails over rigid compliance. It organises global collaboration around three pillars: People, Planet, and Progress. Population-scale solutions like BharatGen, which supports 22 Indian languages, address the reality that most of the world does not operate in English. A proposed global Compute Bank, modelled on India’s own subsidised GPU access at ₹65 per hour, lowers entry barriers everywhere. And the Declaration’s insistence on data sovereignty directly challenges AI extractivism: the pattern in which developing nations’ data is harvested to train models they must then pay to use.
What gives that framework its credibility is the decade of execution that precedes it, because this government did not arrive at AI through a white paper but through the most ambitious digital public infrastructure programme any democracy has undertaken.
Equally telling is how partnerships are now structured, because they are no longer about licensing foreign technology but about co-building sovereign capacity. The Tata Group’s strategic partnership with OpenAI, beginning with 100 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity under the Stargate initiative and scaling to one gigawatt, signals that Indian industry is moving from the demand side to the supply side of global intelligence. India’s formal signing of the Pax Silica Declaration on the sidelines of the summit places it in the US-led coalition securing supply chains for AI, semiconductors, and critical minerals alongside Japan, South Korea, the UK, and Australia. The bilateral India-US AI Opportunity Partnership, signed alongside, commits both nations to pro-innovation approaches on critical technologies, while the India-France Year of Innovation in 2026 adds another axis organised around joint skilling and measurable outcomes.
Under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, the first Global South nation to host the global AI summit series did not merely convene a conversation but laid out the terms on which it intends to compete: a Delhi Declaration that rewrites the rules of AI governance, digital infrastructure processing nearly half the world’s real-time payments, investment commitments in the hundreds of billions, sovereign models built from scratch, and entry into the supply chain security architecture of the AI age. Panini’s lesson was never complicated. Structure is intelligence. India is building that structure now.
(The author is Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas)
