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...

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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.

Remove minister till probe over: Rohit

Quaid Najmi
4 hours ago
3 min read

Says aircraft owners being ‘shielded’

Mumbai: In more no-holds-barred revelations, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) MLA Rohit Pawar claimed that efforts were on to ‘save’ the VSR Ventures Pvt Ltd company officials after the January 28 Baramati air-crash. He demanded the removal of Minister of Civil Aviation K. Rammohna Naidu till the investigations into the Learjet 45 aircraft are completed.

Making a second presentation in a week, Rohit Pawar brought up issues pertaining to illegal registrations, document tampering, insurance manipulations and video-evidence hinting at a potential deliberate act leading to the air-crash in which Nationalist Congress Party President and Deputy CM Ajit A. Pawar was among the five killed.

“Several leaders of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of Andhra Pradesh and former ministers from Maharashtra attended the wedding of VSRVPL owner V. K. Singh’s son Rohit Singh. The company is still operating flights and top politicians continue to use the Learjet planes. Instead of trolling me, the Bharatiya Janata Party should support my demand for a transparent probe,” Rohit Pawar said sharply.

The NCP (SP) lawmaker alleged that the ill-fated Learjet was illegally registered in India with help of Directorate General of Civil Aviation officials. According to him, the plane was imported from the USA, owned by five others earlier, was worth barely Rs 10-15 cr., but deployed to ferry VIPs here.

US Registration

He referred to the sudden appearance of a US registration No. N80PQ’ on the plane’s wreckage after the crash which was not visible earlier, and contended that the aircraft was re-painted at home instead of authorized facilities which could cost Rs 3-4 cr.

Rohit Pawar questioned the AAIB’s claim that the Black Box was burnt in the crash and quoting experts, emphasized that Digital Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder can withstand temperatures of up to 1,100 C for an hour. He wondered why the recorder was sent to Canada when India has a Rs. 90-cr lab capable of the analysis inaugurated last year.

Building up pressure, Rohit Pawar contended that the crash may not be accidental, but the aircraft tilted before crashing as it may have been carrying extra fuel that made the explosion more severe and deadly for those on board.

“Instead of turning back, the plane hit the ground directly. Why did it not fall on the runway but veered off to the side? The DGCA norms stipulated 5000 m visibility but the conditions at Baramati that day were around 3000 m. In such a situation, the flight should have aborted landing or returned to Mumbai as alternatives like Pune, Solapur or Sindhudurg may be technically unfeasible,” Rohit Pawar argued.

Diving deeper, the Karjat-Jamkhed MLA questioned the insurance value of Rs 55 cr and liability coverage of Rs 210 crore for the aircraft allegedly worth just Rs 10-15 cr. He raised doubts on the pilots’ licensing claiming that the Captain Sumit Kapur and a company official allegedly illegally operated different types of aircraft without proper licenses.

Flight Plan

Alleging flight plan tinkering by a Mumbai-based handler named Gopi, Rohit Pawar demanded valid CCTV footage, emails and time-stamped data instead of just ‘paper added to paper’.

Warning investigating officers against playing with the documents, he said “any discrepancy between official records and the video evidence” in his possession could lead to serious questions and repercussions.

Rohit lauds aunt Sunetra Pawar

Rohit Pawar welcomed the move by NCP leaders including his aunt and Deputy CM Sunetra A. Pawar, her son Parth, Sunil Tatkare, Praful Patel, Hasan Mushrif, seeking a CBI probe into the Baramati crash. He noted that they had included several issues raised by him in the letter to CM Devendra Fadnavis.

On the political angle, he said there could be a couple of possibilities – speculation that the NCP (SP) would merge with the SP and join the NDA at the centre, or the SP and Ajit Pawar would quit the NDA; but certain forces were upset with either scenario unfolding.