PM Modi Shares Article on AI Impact Summit 2026, Highlights India’s Vision of Data Sovereignty and Inclusive AI
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday shared an article by Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on the successful conclusion of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, praising it as a brilliant write-up that captures India’s civilisational inspiration and its bold organising principles for AI.
The Prime Minister posted on X: “In this brilliant write-up, Union Minister @HardeepSPuri writes about the successful conclusion of the AI Impact Summit 2026, noting that India drew inspiration from its civilisational impulse. He highlights that India is putting forward its own organising idea: sovereignty over data, inclusion by design and accountability by default.”
The summit in New Delhi drew over 20 heads of state and more than 500 AI leaders from over 100 countries, making it the largest conference of its kind ever held in the Global South.
In his piece, Puri wrote that under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, the first Global South nation to host the global AI summit series did not merely convene discussions but set the terms for competition: a Delhi Declaration that redefines AI governance rules, digital infrastructure handling nearly half the world’s real-time payments, investment commitments in the hundreds of billions, sovereign models built from scratch, and integration into the AI age’s supply chain security architecture.
Puri highlighted Prime Minister Modi’s MANAV vision: ethical guardrails, accountable governance, sovereignty over data to prevent extraction of intelligence as a commodity, broad access so benefits reach a farmer in Madhya Pradesh as surely as an engineer in Bengaluru, and legal validity so every deployed system faces democratic scrutiny.
He added that the Prime Minister’s formulation of giving AI an open sky while keeping command in human hands draws a line many advanced economies have been reluctant to draw. These principles now carry multilateral weight through the Delhi Declaration — the first major AI governance blueprint from the Global South — taking a development-oriented view anchored in a techno-legal approach that favours flexible guardrails over rigid compliance. It organises global collaboration around three pillars: People, planet, and progress.
Puri pointed to population-scale solutions like BharatGen, supporting 22 Indian languages, acknowledging that most of the world does not operate in English. A proposed global compute bank, modelled on India’s subsidised GPU access at ₹65 per hour, lowers entry barriers everywhere. The insistence on data sovereignty challenges AI extractivism — the pattern where developing nations’ data is harvested to train models they must then pay to use.
(with inputs from IANS)
