This episode is part of our special series on the India AI Impact Summit, examining the conversations, decisions, and debates that are shaping global AI governance.
In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, associate fellow at Carnegie India, speaks with Saurabh Garg, secretary at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, who chaired the working group on democratizing AI resources at the India AI Impact Summit. The working group brought together over 30 countries and several international organizations to tackle a fundamental question: how do you make the foundational resources for AI, compute, data, models, and talent, accessible to countries that currently have very little of it?
This episode explores:
How did the working group build consensus across such a diverse set of countries and such different levels of AI maturity? How did India's own experience with digital public infrastructure inform the thinking behind these global initiatives? What are the next steps, and what role does India see itself playing going forward?
Episode Notes
The working group was designed from the start to be bottom-up rather than top-down. Rather than starting from the positions of countries already leading in AI, the agenda was shaped through consultations, bilateral discussions, and deliberate outreach beyond official channels. The concerns that emerged were consistent: uneven concentration of compute, limited access to quality data, dependence on external platforms, and the risk that much of the global south would not be able to fully participate in or benefit from AI-driven development.
The two key outcomes are the Democratic Diffusion of AI Resources charter, a collective commitment to inclusive and equitable AI development adopted in the summit's final declaration, and MAITRI, a collaborative platform designed to connect governments, researchers, and institutions to the essential building blocks of AI without each country having to start from scratch. Saurabh Garg draws a direct line between these initiatives and India's own experience with layered digital public infrastructure, pointing to the principles behind Aadhaar, UPI, and the India AI Mission as exactly what informed the working group's approach. The real work, he makes clear, begins now.
