Panelists. / Ritu Marwah

Prime Minister Narendra Modi co-chaired the AI Action Summit in Paris on Feb.10 and 11, 2025 on his way to meet the President of the United States. Indians will play a big role in the AI revolution, said speakers at the Alliance Literary Festival in Bengaluru on Feb.13. The theme of the festival was “Welcome To The Asian Century”. 

Author Jayanth Kolla, whose book AI Rising: India’s Artificial Intelligence Growth Story is widely read by the 20-26 year old youth in India as AI 101, shared his optimism on the role Indians are playing in the AI revolution.

“If you look at the research papers coming out on AI in the world you will find that 25-30 percent of the contributors are Indians. Indians are thriving as far as AI innovation and evolution is concerned but they are doing it outside India.” 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his speech at the AI action Summit in Paris  charted a very good path for the role India can play in AI’s evolution, said Kolla. 

Templates of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) deployed

Panelists at the Alliance Literary Festival panel on AI the Next Frontier. / Ritu Marwah

Well-designed digital public infrastructure (DPI) augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) can enable the use of data for development, creating new jobs and delivering better health and education outcomes. 

Given India’s achievements in building a Digital Public Infrastructure for 1.4 billion people there is an opportunity here for India to become a leader in the deployment of DPI in the Global South. 

The team that has created India’s large digital public infrastructures (DPI) have found a way to templatize it and export it to countries in three weeks flat, said Kolla. 

India Stack is India’s BRI 

DPI like Aadhaar (digital identity), Unified Payments Interface (UPI), DigiLocker (document storage), DIKSHA (education platform), Government e-Marketplace (GeM), Account Aggregator Framework, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, eSanjeevani, Digital Rupee, Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), Unified Payments Interface (UPI), NamaYatris, etc  can be deployed by India in countries in the Global South. 

BRI is a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the government of the People's Republic of China in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations.

DPI, known as the India Stack, is going to be India’s BRI, Kolla said. 

AI4Bharat initiative

AI is being interpreted around the country as per people’s exposure to it . “For the farmers in Tamilnadu it is artificial insemination,” said Padmini Ray Murray, founder of Design Beku: a collective that emerged from a desire to explore how technology and design can be decolonial, local, and ethical. 

“People on the ground are removed from AI. LLM is trained on largely used languages like English. Vernacular languages speaking people will not be served,” feared Murray. 

AI4Bharat, a research lab at IIT Madras, is dedicated to advancing AI technology for Indian languages through open-source contributions.

India has 1400 dialects. We are working to develop AI models that effectively understand and generate text in various Indian languages, overcoming limitations of existing global AI systems.   

“I am advising Two.AI who are based in San Francisco. They are building the Indic languages LLMs  from the ground up,” said Kolla.  As is a Bengaluru based company funded by Reliance. “All non-English LLMs are nothing but wrappers from English LLMs and ChatGPT. ”

Kolla felt that “Once we crack that at an architectural level, we can export it to the rest of the non-English speaking world.”

“What we can lead in is to pay much closer attention to the way that our language conceptualizes the words and use them as building blocks rather than blindly buying into the Anglocentric European language model, " said Murray. “India can play a leading role in that. It has to be granular and modular, built at scale and by using models that make sense in our linguistic systems.”

“India can be the king maker with the talent pool we have,” said Kolla. 

The Alliance Literary Festival 4.0: The Asian Century is one of India’s premier literary and cultural celebrations, hosted by Alliance University, Bangalore. Bringing together distinguished writers, thinkers, and performers from 25+ countries,