As New Delhi hosts the India-AI Impact Summit, the significance extends far beyond a packed Bharat Mandapam and a high-profile guest list. For the first time, a major global AI summit is being held in the Global South, after earlier editions in the United Kingdom, South Korea and France. The venue change is not merely symbolic. Instead, it signals an emerging reality: India's voice is increasingly shaping the rules and the relationships that will define the next era of technology, and the world seems eager to hear what the country has to say.
For years, global technology governance has been framed as a binary choice. The United States represents a corporate‑led model: rapid innovation driven by private platforms, proprietary ecosystems, and regulation that is often fragmented or reactive. China, by contrast, represents a state‑led model: strategic industrial policy, tightly coupled technology and governance systems, and the export of digital infrastructure through bilateral and multilateral arrangements that often bundle technology with geopolitical influence.
As competition between these two models intensifies, many countries, particularly in the Global South, have found both options unsatisfying. The American model promises innovation but often leaves governments dependent on a handful of global firms with limited accountability. The Chinese model offers scale and speed, but at the cost of deep strategic dependence, opaque governance, and reduced policy autonomy over data and digital infrastructure. Increasingly, the search is on for a path that allows sovereign nations to access modern digital systems that serve citizens at scale, without locking governments into vendor monopolies or long‑term geopolitical alignments that they cannot easily exit.
India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is increasingly presenting itself as this option: a credible third way that emphasises public value, interoperable infrastructure, and practical governance over ideology.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) sits at the centre of this pitch. Over the past decade, systems such as Aadhaar for digital identity, UPI (Unified Payments Interface) for real-time payments, and ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) for marketplaces have demonstrated that large-scale digital systems can be built as public goods rather than proprietary platforms. These systems now form the backbone of service delivery, financial inclusion, and governance for over a billion people. Crucially, this has meant that they have also proven to be exportable.
Over the past two years, India has signed formal cooperation agreements on DPI with more than twenty countries across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Several African nations are among the fastest adopters. Countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Lesotho are working with India to replicate components of the India Stack for digital identity, payments, health systems, and public administration. India's payment infrastructure has also quietly gone global, with UPI now available in multiple countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Qatar, and France.
Digital document and data‑exchange platforms are travelling as well. Countries such as Cuba, Kenya, the UAE, and Laos have signed agreements to adopt or adapt India's DigiLocker framework, allowing citizens to store and verify official documents digitally. Education platforms like DIKSHA and governance tools such as e‑Office and e‑Courts are also being shared through India Stack Global, a government-backed initiative that makes India's DPI components available for replication rather than resale.
What is more striking is that this interest is no longer confined to developing economies. The European Union, which was once among the sharpest critics of India's digital identity and data practices, is increasingly engaging with Indian DPI concepts as it grapples with its own concerns about technological sovereignty. While Europe's regulatory standards remain distinct, the shift itself is telling: India's experience is no longer seen merely as an outlier, but as a reference point in a broader global conversation about how digital infrastructure should be built and governed.
Taken together, these examples reveal why India's third way in technology is gaining traction. It is not exporting any particular ideology, nor does it seek to assert dominance. What it does offer instead is architecture - an open, interoperable digital framework that allows countries to modernise while retaining control over their own systems.
The AI Impact Summit itself reflects this positioning. Consider the summit's guiding idea: Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya, meaning welfare for all, happiness for all. Through this lens, India is deliberately pushing global AI diplomacy away from abstract declarations and toward measurable deployment: how AI can deliver outcomes in health, education, agriculture, public services, and climate resilience. This emphasis resonates far beyond India, particularly among countries that feel marginalised by AI governance debates dominated by the Global North. It reframes the central question: not only how to regulate AI, but how to ensure its benefits are distributed rather than concentrated.
This focus on deployable systems rather than abstract principles is mirrored in India's approach to AI governance itself. Rather than rushing into a single, rigid AI law or leaving governance entirely to market forces, India has chosen a pragmatic approach: principle-based guidance, the use of existing legal frameworks where possible, and targeted amendments to close gaps as risks become clearer. All while creating sandboxes where innovators can test out new ideas under safe parameters, and also investing in state-backed initiatives like BHASHINI or AIKosha to supply them with the talent and resources needed to scale up, should they prove viable. This techno-legal stance, combining rules with practical technical measures, maps well onto the needs of many developing countries that cannot afford compliance-heavy regimes yet cannot ignore harms such as deepfakes, bias, and online fraud.
Alongside governance frameworks, India is also investing in the physical and digital infrastructure needed to democratise AI access at scale. Under the IndiaAI Mission, the country is building a shared national compute backbone, comprising more than 34,000 GPUs deployed across empanelled data centres, that startups, researchers, and institutions can access at subsidised rates, rather than relying on a handful of foreign cloud providers. In parallel, initiatives such as BharatGen, a government‑funded, multimodal foundation model programme, are being developed as international, rather than sovereign, public digital goods, designed to be deployed locally by any government and or institution, to address an array of nuanced use-cases. Together, these efforts reflect a deliberate attempt by India to ensure that the benefits of AI are not gated by capital, geography, or platform control, but are made freely available as shared infrastructure.
None of this is to suggest that India's model is without challenges. Questions around data protection, institutional capacity, and equitable access need more attention and will grow more complex as these systems scale domestically and abroad. But what distinguishes India at this moment is that, in a fractured technological world where others too often chase futile perfection or extractive dominance, it offers a pathway that many countries can realistically hope to follow.
India's opportunity, then, extends beyond hosting a single summit or exporting a protocol. It lies in anchoring a new form of digital alignment, one not defined by blocs or coercive dependencies, but by shared capability and development‑focused outcomes. Much as the non-alignment movement once offered respite to countries caught between a Cold War geopolitical reality, for countries weary of constantly having to choose the lesser of two evils in order to keep pace with the technological revolution, India's third way offers a different organising principle for cooperation, treating them as co-creators with the autonomy and understanding needed to make the best choices for their citizens.
Ultimately, what India is putting on the table is a path to self‑determination. Too often, in these moments, from the Industrial Age to the Internet era, that path simply did not exist for most countries. Having walked it itself, India now operates in a world where digital transformation driven by AI is increasingly unavoidable. Its most consequential contribution, then, may be in using what it has learned to expand the range of futures countries can choose for themselves, and thereby reclaim a say in how the digital state is shaped.
(The writer is a Public Policy Professional and a graduate from Harvard Kennedy School.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
