New Delhi’s "Sovereign Shift": India Stakes Its Claim as the Third Pillar of the AI World Order

 New Delhi’s "Sovereign Shift": India Stakes Its Claim as the Third Pillar of the AI World Order

BY R Kannan

For decades, the global technology narrative has been a bipolar dialogue between the proprietary "walled gardens" of Silicon Valley and the state-led surveillance apparatus of Beijing. This week, at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 suggested that a third pole has finally emerged.

The summit, which will conclude on Friday, was less a traditional trade show and more a declaration of "Sovereign Intelligence." Through a series of high-stakes infrastructure deals and a new regulatory framework dubbed "MANAV," India is positioning itself as the primary architect of AI for the Global South.

The Infrastructure of Independence

The summit’s most significant commercial milestone arrived via a multi-year alliance between the Tata Group and OpenAI. The partnership aims to build a 100-megawatt AI-ready data centre, with a roadmap to scale to a staggering 1 gigawatt. This "compute backbone" is designed to ensure that India’s data—the "raw ore" of the digital age—is refined within its own borders.

"India is moving from being a service economy to a product economy," noted Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a plenary session. This shift is backed by the government’s ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission, which has already democratized access to high-end compute. By making over 38,000 GPUs available to local startups via a shared cloud, New Delhi is effectively lowering the barrier to entry for indigenous innovation.

MANAV: The New Regulatory Export

While the infrastructure provided the "muscle," the "MANAV" (Human) framework provided the soul. Introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the framework—standing for Moral, Accountable, National, Accessible, and Valid—serves as a legislative blueprint for ethical AI.

Unlike the European Union’s risk-based approach, MANAV focuses on "Digital Public Infrastructure" (DPI). The vision is to treat AI as a public utility, similar to India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI). By mandating that AI augment rather than replace human decision-making—the "Human-in-the-Loop" doctrine—India is attempting to bypass the social displacement that many Western economists fear.

Language as a Frontier

The summit also marked the end of the English language’s hegemony in AI. The unveiling of 12 indigenous foundation models, including "BharatGen," showcased LLMs trained on 22 official Indian languages. These models are not mere translations of Western data; they are built on the "Bharat Data Sagar," capturing cultural and linguistic nuances that global models often miss.

The launch of NPCI’s FiMI model further demonstrated this utility, enabling "Agentic AI" to resolve financial disputes in local dialects, potentially bringing hundreds of millions of unbanked citizens into the formal digital economy.

The Labor Paradox

However, the summit did not shy away from the looming labour crisis. The "Future of Work" sessions were dominated by the SOAR (Skilling for AI Readiness) initiative, which aims to provide nano-credentials to one million Indian youth. The consensus among the "Big Tech" CEOs in attendance—including Satya Nadella and Sam Altman—was that India’s demographic dividend could either be its greatest asset or its biggest liability, depending on the speed of this reskilling.

As the "Delhi Declaration" is signed, the message to the world is clear: India will no longer be content as a back-office for global tech giants. It is building its own chips, training its own models, and writing its own rules. For the Global South, New Delhi is no longer just a capital city; it is a laboratory for a more inclusive digital future.