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By:

Akhilesh Sinha

25 June 2025 at 2:53:54 pm

Code for the Many

India wants artificial intelligence to serve development rather than deepen divides Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting with his Bhutanese counterpart Tshering Tobgay in New Delhi. New Delhi:  As the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026 enters its third day, India appears to be pressing a case that cuts against the grain of much global AI discourse. The summit has been framed by the Sanskrit maxim  sarvajan hitaya, sarvajan sukhaya  (for the welfare and happiness of all) and seeks to move the...

Code for the Many

India wants artificial intelligence to serve development rather than deepen divides Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting with his Bhutanese counterpart Tshering Tobgay in New Delhi. New Delhi:  As the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026 enters its third day, India appears to be pressing a case that cuts against the grain of much global AI discourse. The summit has been framed by the Sanskrit maxim  sarvajan hitaya, sarvajan sukhaya  (for the welfare and happiness of all) and seeks to move the debate beyond safety alarms and corporate rivalry towards a more pointed question: who, exactly, should benefit from artificial intelligence. Building on its advocacy in 2023 for fairer digital and financial access for the Global South, India is now positioning itself as a steward of a more democratic, human-centric AI that is meant to narrow, rather than entrench, global and domestic inequalities. That ambition builds on India’s posture at earlier global forums. In 2023, New Delhi argued that digital public infrastructure and concessional financing should be treated as global public goods, particularly for poorer nations. Three years on, the argument has sharpened. If AI is to shape growth, productivity and governance in the coming decades, India insists that its benefits must not mirror the inequalities of the industrial and digital revolutions before it. This sets India apart from the dominant poles of AI power. The United States and China have raced ahead with proprietary models and compute-heavy ecosystems. India, lacking the same scale of capital or chips, has instead emphasised deployment by asking how AI can be applied cheaply, widely and with human oversight. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often argued, AI is a double-edged tool: transformative when governed well, corrosive when left to markets alone. Stark Contrast The contrast with earlier summits is deliberate. Britain’s 2023 meeting at Bletchley Park fixated on catastrophic risks and frontier safety. South Korea’s Seoul summit in 2024 focused on scientific cooperation to mitigate harm. France’s Paris meeting in 2025 tried to tether AI to sustainability and public interest. India’s turn is broader and more political. The question it poses is not merely how to restrain AI, but how to distribute it. At the heart of the summit is an effort to make AI legible to ordinary citizens. Demonstrations are expected on its use in schools, hospitals, farms and welfare schemes, with particular emphasis on small towns and rural areas. The aim is to narrow what Indian officials increasingly describe as an “AI divide” between those who can exploit algorithms and those who remain invisible to them. The economic case is straightforward. AI-driven tools can raise productivity by automating routine work, improve hiring by reducing bias, and conserve energy through smarter consumption. In education, adaptive learning systems promise to personalise instruction in overcrowded classrooms. In agriculture, predictive models can guide farmers on soil health, pests and weather, lifting incomes while improving food security. In healthcare, AI-assisted diagnostics, from cancer detection in scans to remote patient monitoring, could compensate for India’s chronic shortage of doctors, especially outside cities. One of the summit’s most politically charged themes is road safety. India records between four and five lakh road accidents a year. According to figures cited in Parliament by Nitin Gadkari, 2024 alone saw 1.77 lakh fatalities, a third of them on national highways that make up just 2% of the road network. Officials argue that AI - through speed monitoring, pre-collision alerts and predictive traffic management - could dramatically cut deaths and emissions alike. Panels on data-driven transport policy will test how far such optimism can be translated into enforcement. Critics note that India still struggles with patchy data quality, weak local capacity and uneven internet access. Grand visions, they warn, risk dissolving into pilot projects. Yet that is precisely why New Delhi is pressing its case internationally. By pooling models, datasets and best practices, especially among countries of the Global South, it hopes to reduce costs and avoid dependence on a handful of foreign platforms. If successful, the IndiaAI Impact Summit will mark a shift in the global AI conversation. From fear to function; from concentration to diffusion. India is betting that the future of artificial intelligence will not be decided solely in data centres and boardrooms, but in classrooms, clinics, fields and highways. Whether the world follows is another matter. But New Delhi has made clear where it wants the argument to go.

New-Age IPOs Are Re-Wiring India’s Growth Story

The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet.

In 2025, India’s IPO market quietly crossed a symbolic milestone of more than Rs 1.7 lakh crore raised in a single year, surpassing even the blockbuster primary issues of 2024. The narrative has moved beyond the glitz of unicorn status to the grit of the balance sheet. While the successful listings of Lenskart, Meesho, PhysicsWallah, and Pine Labs are being cheered for their listing gains, the real story lies in their strategic audacity.


For years, the Indian e-commerce playbook dictated by global incumbents focused on asset-heavy warehouses and a ‘Top 10 per cent’ consumer base. The logic was simple: control the inventory to control the experience. Meesho disrupted this by realising that "Bharat" doesn't need a prime subscription; it needs value. But the real genius, which even the most sophisticated logistics players struggled to master, was their backhaul optimisation. Meesho tapped into the fragmented trucking industry’s greatest inefficiency: the return journey. By intelligently coordinating with third-party logistics to fill trucks that would otherwise return empty from Tier-2 and Tier-3 hubs, Meesho slashed delivery costs to levels that asset-heavy giants simply couldn't touch.


The Data: This operational efficiency helped Meesho shrink its FY24 losses from Rs 1,569 crore to a mere ₹53 crore, leading to an 80x-subscribed IPO—a feat of frugality and scale combined.


Lenskart Edge

Legacy retail houses in India treated eyewear as a fragmented, low-frequency medical purchase. Lenskart turned it into a high-frequency fashion accessory. However, their true disruption was vertical integration. While traditional groups relied on complex distributor networks that ate 30-40 per cent of the margins, Lenskart built its own robotic manufacturing ecosystem. By controlling the journey from the factory floor to the customer’s face, they decoupled quality from cost. In FY25, Lenskart reported a net profit of Rs 297 crore, proving that in a market like India, owning the supply chain is the only way to own the customer.


The Edtech sector was nearly written off after the spectacular collapse of marketing-heavy giants. The industry’s "Big Boys" spent billions on celebrity endorsements and aggressive sales tactics, treating education as a product rather than a service. Alakh Pandey’s PhysicsWallah (PW) achieved what legacy coaching institutes and well-funded EdTechs couldn't: scalable trust. By focusing on a "community-first" approach and keeping fees at a fraction of the market rate, PW built a loyal student base that required zero customer acquisition cost. Their pivot to a hybrid model merging low-cost digital reach with physical centres pushed FY25 revenue to Rs 2,887 crore with a growing profit margin. PW proved that in the Indian heartland, brand affinity is built in the classroom, not on a billboard.


Invisible Infrastructure

Traditional banks viewed the Point-of-Sale (POS) machine as a mere card-swiping tool. They ignored the merchant’s deeper pain points. Pine Labs disrupted this by treating the POS as a "Smart Business Terminal". They layered software over hardware, providing merchants with instant EMI, loyalty analytics, and embedded credit rails. This transformed a passive device into an active revenue generator for small businesses. By delivering back-to-back profitable quarters (Q2 FY26 net profit of Rs 6 crore), Pine Labs showed that the future of fintech isn't in competing with banks but in building the sophisticated "soft power" infrastructure that banks lack.


India owes much of its economic foundation to the Tatas, Birlas, and Reliance groups that built steel plants, financial systems, telecom networks, and global brands over decades. But today’s startup founders start with a problem, not a product. They design for Bharat, not just India. They prioritise technology but worship operational excellence. They scale without waiting for permission.


The Lenskart–PW–Meesho–Pine Labs cohort is not the end of an era. It is the beginning of a new industrial revolution, “Made in India, by India, for India.” And this time, the assembly line is not steel or petrochemicals.


It is creativity, technology, trust, and bold entrepreneurship.


(Disclaimer: Stocks mentioned in this article are not to be considered as a recommendation, and the author does not own any of these stocks.)


(The writer is a Chartered Accountant. Views personal.)


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