DC Edit | India should grab opportunity to be AI enabler
The world sees in the progress of artificial intelligence up to this point a transformative inflection point in history.
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2026-02-19 20:01 GMT
The world sees in the progress of artificial intelligence up to this point a transformative inflection point in history. Everyone has been climbing on to the bandwagon to the extent that AI cannot afford to fail now. But it also takes smartness to grab the opportunity to be a part of this big human-driven machine intelligence movement and India may have achieved that by putting together the world’s biggest AI summit in the capital.
In a typically Indian way, the organisation was not without glitches, and they point to natural human stupidity, a force that may have been in existence for several thousand years. The point is AI may some day set right even the traffic chaos in New Delhi, which was at its worst when the summit royalty of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Big Tech tsars, sheikhs and captains of industry descended on the Bharat Mandapam.
The power of AI is infinite, which is why what the AI summit is doing in drawing the elite with the big purses to back the tech savvy and their knowhow is significant. Buoyant in mood as the days were taking in the projections of what AI can do for the people of the planet, they might not have been the time to consider seriously the scarier scenario of machines and algorithms taking over the world while giving warfare added clout with its programs.
A broad goal of the summit is also to get thoughts rolling on how to build safeguards so that AI remains sensitive and responsive even as efforts are made to keep it human-centric rather than let it be totally machine-centric. To make AI bring welfare for all and contribute to their happiness and to a global common good is a noble goal but, given human history, there will be deviations, like we see already in deepfakes and obviously fabricated content.
It is mind boggling how many trillions of dollars have already been ploughed into the AI race and how governments as well as individual political parties in India are now harnessing the power of technology to keep their constituents engaged. The kind of pledges that have come in, including from mega Indian corporations besides America’s global giants stating their willingness to invest here and build India’s expanding AI ecosystem, is heartwarming.
Where India must respond is in ensuring that the mismanagement of aspects of the summit do not spill over into AI projects and enmesh them in typical Indian bureaucratic sloth and its proverbial red tape, especially in matters of feeding the power-hungry programs with sufficient electricity and water for cooling if the budding AI ecosystem is to make life easier for all. Considering what AI can do in democratising access to education and health, those venturing to
take India along in the journey to building the framework for AI, including its frontier models, should be welcomed with open arms. The benefits can be huge for a country that has become accustomed to doing things at scale as in developing its UPI payment system.
India also used the opportunity to set up bilateral meetings with many countries. In the era of American-induced uncertainty in politics and trade, these are very important and yet it appears American AI was more of a chief guest as India grabbed the chance to host the annual summit of human brains to reflect on the computing power of chip-based machines and their positive contribution to mankind.