The View From Delhi: AI For ALL

By Ambassador Vinay Kwatra

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 represents a defining moment in the global conversation on artificial intelligence. Scheduled for February 16-20, 2026, in New Delhi the Summit will bring together government representatives, international organizations, academics, researchers, and industry leaders from nearly 100 countries. Together, they will deliberate on the profound impact that AI will have on our societies, economies, polities, and the world at large.

This summit builds directly on prior gatherings: the UK’s AI Safety Summit in 2023, the AI Seoul Summit in 2024, and the France AI Action Summit in 2025 (where India served as a co-host and Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced this event). While those earlier forums emphasized AI safety, ethics, innovation, practical implementation, economic opportunities, environmental risks, and labor market disruptions, India’s hosting shifts the emphasis decisively toward tangible, inclusive impact. This is the first AI Summit that is being hosted in the Global South.

What sets the India AI Summit apart is its proactive focus on Impact. The summit champions a vision of democratized AI that uplifts everyone. At its core, the summit is anchored in the three foundational Sutras—or guiding principles—of People, Planet, and Progress:

·        The People Sutra envisions AI as a force for genuine human progress. It calls for respecting cultural diversity, preservation of human dignity, and inclusion in AI’s design and deployment. Technology must stay human-centered, prioritizing people-first development while upholding safety, trust, and shared benefits for all.

·        The Planet Sutra insists on responsible innovation that minimizes AI’s resource footprint—even as it accelerates climate resilience and environmental protection. Progress must align with planetary stewardship, ensuring AI bolsters rather than erodes global sustainability.

·        The Progress Sutra positions AI as an engine for inclusive growth. It calls for aligning AI’s advantages with global development goals, ensuring equitable access to opportunities, democratizing key resources, and deploying AI to speed socio-economic advances in critical sectors like health, education, governance, and agriculture.

These pillars converge into a powerful mantra: ‘AI for All’, underlining a commitment to making AI accessible, affordable, and beneficial across populations. For policymakers across the Global South, this Summit will present a new blueprint. In the AI race, each country will not be able to devote the immense amount of resources required to build AI infrastructure. India, through its experience of creating a behemoth digital public infrastructure for its 1.4 billion population, is showing that a different path is possible: investing in sovereign efficient models  that can deliver 95 % of real-world value in local languages and contexts, and optimized access to GPUs and data centers so startups and public agencies can actually build and deploy.

Domestically, the Government of India is translating its “AI for All” vision into action through the IndiaAI Mission, committed to building capabilities across a comprehensive five-layer AI architecture: applications, models, compute, data centers/networks, and energy.

A key priority for India is to develop sovereign, homegrown AI models to safeguard data security, cultural relevance, and strategic autonomy in an era where technologies and supply chains can be weaponized. Under the mission, various indigenous models are in development.  India is also advancing and optimising compute access, custom chips, semiconductor ecosystem growth (some in collaboration with American firms), data center incentives, and energy expansion (including nuclear energy via the recently legislated  SHANTI Act).

The summit will also see significant participation from the United States, including the largest industry contingent alongside American researchers and administration officials. This reflects the natural synergy between India and US ecosystems: the US brings cutting-edge research, cloud infrastructure, and capital, while India offers vast scale, linguistic diversity, a dynamic startup ecosystem (where nearly 90% of recent startups are AI-powered), and a massive talent pool.

Exciting new partnerships with the US administration industry and the scientific community are on the anvil. Beyond the tech-industry, the India AI Impact Summit also holds significance for geopolitical analysts, researchers, and anyone concerned with humanity’s future. It heralds India’s leadership in shaping AI not just for national gain, but for equitable global progress—highlighting that technology can be a tool for welfare, inclusion, and shared prosperity.

(Kwatra is India’s Ambassador to Washington. Previously he has been Joint Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office in New Delhi.)