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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.

Unrest within Mahayuti

Updated: Jan 21, 2025

Mahayuti

Mumbai: The state administration on Sunday stalled the appointments of guardian ministers in Raigad and Nashik districts. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had cleared the appointments before he left for Davos in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum on Saturday. They are believed to have been stalled on behest of Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who heads the state in absence of the Chief Minister.


NCP’s Aditi Tatkare and BJP’s Girish Mahajan were entrusted with responsibilities of guardian minister for the Raigad and Nashik districts respectively, where Shiv Sena’s Bharat Gogawale and Dada Bhuse had staked claims. Gogawale is a first-time minister while, Bhuse had been the guardian minister of the district during previous government under Eknath Shinde.


Shiv Sena, NCP and BJP all the three constituents of Mahayuti have strong roots in both the districts. However, the Shiv Sena and the NCP had been particularly on loggerheads there. The Shiv Sena, which had been demanding the guardian minister’s post in Nashik district has managed to win only two assembly seats in the district where the NCP has Six and the BJP has Five MLAs. On the contrary, in Raigad the NCP has won only one seat while the Shiv Sena and the BJP both have Three MLAs each in the district.


Sunil Tatkare, MP from Raigad Lok Sabha constituency and the stat unit president of the NCP and father of Aditi Tatkare, had been the guardian minister of Raigad between 2004 and 2014. Gogawale had always been his political opponent before Tatkare joined the Mahayuti government under Ajit Pawar’s leadership in 2023. Gogawale claimed that all the Six Shiv Sena-BJP MLAs in the district had opined in his favour to be the guardian minister of the district and after the decision to appoint Aditi Tatkare was announced, his supporters resorted to violent protests. They burnt tyres in bid to stall traffic on highway in the district. Reacting to the developments, Tatkare said that the issue should be pondered over after CM Fadnavis returns from Davos on Saturday and settled amicably.


In Nashik Girish Mahajan had been the guardian minister of the district between 2014 and 2019 when Fadnavis was the Chief Minister.


The post of guardian minister doesn’t have any constitutional mandate and is considered to be a political appointment. Guardian ministers head the district planning and development councils (DPDC) that control the funds for development works being carried out in the particular district. This control wields much of political power to the minister in that district whereby spreading the party in the district becomes much easier. This is the reason why the grass root politicians seem to be very sensitive to such appointments.


While Gogawale and Bhuse are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian ministers, some others like NCP’s Hasan Mushrif and BJP’s Pankaja Munde are unhappy about not being appointed as guardian district in their home districts of Kolhapur and Beed respectively. DCM Shinde is learnt to have gone to his ancestral village Dare in Satara district after the decision and BJP’s firefighters Chandrashekhar Bawankule and Girish Mahajan are expected to meet him there to try finding a way out of the issue.

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