New Delhi: India has positioned itself among the world’s first wave of artificial intelligence powers, with a strategy centred on large-scale adoption, economic returns and responsible governance, Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Speaking at a panel on global AI dynamics, Vaishnaw said India is working across all five layers of the AI stack—applications, models, chips, infrastructure and energy—arguing that real power in AI comes from deployment and productivity gains rather than the sheer size of models. He noted that most practical use cases can be handled by mid-sized models and that enterprise adoption, not model scale, will determine return on investment.
The Minister cautioned against equating geopolitical dominance with ownership of massive AI systems, pointing out that such models can be switched off and may impose heavy economic costs on their developers. The future of what he termed the “fifth industrial revolution”, he said, lies in deploying the lowest-cost solutions that deliver the highest returns.
Drawing parallels with India’s success in building digital public infrastructure, Vaishnaw said the government is pursuing AI diffusion across the economy. A major bottleneck—access to computing power—is being addressed through a public-private partnership that has empanelled around 38,000 GPUs as a national compute facility, offering students, researchers and startups access at nearly one-third of global costs.
He outlined four pillars of India’s AI roadmap: a shared national compute platform; a free bouquet of AI models for most real-world needs; large-scale skilling to train 10 million people in AI; and enabling India’s IT sector to shift towards AI-driven productivity for global enterprises, according to an official release.
On governance, Vaishnaw stressed a “techno-legal” approach, saying regulation must be backed by technical tools capable of addressing risks such as bias and deepfakes. India, he said, is developing systems for deepfake detection, bias mitigation and safe model deployment that can withstand legal scrutiny.
The remarks underscored India’s ambition to build AI as a widely accessible economic tool rather than a concentrated technological asset, positioning the country as a major force in the next phase of global digital transformation.
