In a Hindustan Times opinion ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Prof. Suman Chakraborty, director of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, argues that India is at a pivotal moment in the global evolution of artificial intelligence — not just as a technology race, but as a force for meaningful human development and societal benefit. He writes that AI has moved beyond promise to pervasiveness, and the key questions now are for whom AI works, at what cost, and with what accountability, especially in diverse contexts like India’s.
Chakraborty highlights that by hosting a major AI summit in the Global South, India isn’t merely hosting a conversation but reframing the grammar of AI — shifting focus from computational might toward real-world impact grounded in people, planet, and progress. The summit’s agenda, anchored in these principles and operationalised through seven thematic “chakras,” reflects an emphasis on inclusive human capital, safety, sustainability, and shared economic growth rather than merely chasing model size or benchmarks.
India’s AI trajectory, he stresses, is inherently different from that of advanced economies because of its scale, diversity, and resource constraints. These conditions push innovation toward frugality, interpretability, multilingualism, and robustness — features that, if successful locally, could be portable to other developing regions facing similar challenges. The goal isn’t to dominate AI by owning the largest models, but to shape meaningful, socially embedded systems that are bias-audited, energy-aware, and regulation-ready.
Ultimately, Chakraborty says the India AI Impact Summit should be seen not as a one-off event but as a catalyst for systemic change, moving from ideas to outcomes that improve lives. By focusing on tangible pipelines — from youth initiatives and compendiums of solutions to frameworks that embed trustworthiness into algorithms and governance — India aims to define its leadership not by technological sovereignty alone but by moral and developmental credibility as it gears up toward 2047, the centenary of independence.
