Interpreting India

Jaspreet's framing for the AI and work debate is worth staying with. He is not dismissive of disruption: he thinks AI will destroy certain jobs, create new ones, and the rupture will be real. But he pushes back on the idea that job destruction is the right frame. The more useful question, he argues, is what happens to workers, and the answer to that depends almost entirely on whether people develop the skills to move into the roles that AI creates rather than the ones it displaces. His reference point is the IT sector itself, an industry born out of the last great technology disruption, when fears about computers eliminating clerical work gave way to an entirely new economy of higher-paying, more fulfilling jobs. The same logic, he believes, applies now.

The bulk of the conversation settles on AI literacy, a concept Jaspreet distinguishes sharply from training. Training teaches you how to use a specific tool. Literacy gives you the grammar to work with any tool, across any context. He lays out a five-step framework from his book, reads, writes, ads, thinks, does, designed as a practical ladder for building that literacy, and is candid that even three years after ChatGPT, most organizations have brought the horse to the water without making it drink. On the policy side, he is supportive of initiatives like AI in school curricula and IIT fellowships, but his bigger ask is that India treat AI the way it treated digital public infrastructure: as a genuine national mission, not a sectoral initiative. On deepfakes and copyright, his view is pragmatic: deepfakes are a known evil that needs specific, exemplary regulation rather than an omnibus AI law, and copyright will likely resolve through a combination of revenue sharing agreements and citation norms, neither side fully satisfied but better than where things stand today.

Episode Contributors
Jaspreet Bindra is the founder of AI&Beyond and The Tech Whisperer, and author of 'Winning with AI: Your Guide to AI Literacy.' He has served as the group chief digital officer at the Mahindra Group, as a regional director at Microsoft India, and as a general manager in the Tata Group as part of the select Tata Administrative Services. He was also a member of the founding team at Baazee.com, which later became eBay India.

Adarsh Ranjan is a research analyst at Carnegie India where his research focuses on AI and emerging technologies, digital transformation, and technology partnerships. His current research explores India’s evolving policy on AI compute and digital transformation in Global South countries.

Timestamps

00:08 Introduction to AI and India's Future

03:15 AI's Impact on Work and Adoption Trends

11:50 Job Transformation vs. Job Destruction in IT

16:06 The Importance of AI Literacy

21:55 Framework for AI Literacy

28:32 Challenges in AI Adoption

32:02 Government Initiatives for AI Education

35:38 Ethics in AI: Deepfakes and Copyright

Every two weeks, Interpreting India brings you diverse voices from India and around the world to explore the critical questions shaping the nation's future. We delve into how technology, the economy, and foreign policy intertwine to influence India's relationship with the global stage.
As a Carnegie India production, hosted by Carnegie scholars, Interpreting India, a Carnegie India production, provides insightful perspectives and cutting-edge by tackling the defining questions that chart India's course through the next decade.
Stay tuned for thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and a deeper understanding of India's place in the world.
Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to join the conversation and be part of Interpreting India's journey.

This episode is part of our special series on the India AI Impact Summit, examining the conversations, decisions, and debates that are shaping global AI governance.

The working group was designed from the start to be bottom-up rather than top-down. Rather than starting from the positions of countries already leading in AI, the agenda was shaped through consultations, bilateral discussions, and deliberate outreach beyond official channels. The concerns that emerged were consistent: uneven concentration of compute, limited access to quality data, dependence on external platforms, and the risk that much of the global south would not be able to fully participate in or benefit from AI-driven development.

The two key outcomes are the Democratic Diffusion of AI Resources charter, a collective commitment to inclusive and equitable AI development adopted in the summit's final declaration, and MAITRI, a collaborative platform designed to connect governments, researchers, and institutions to the essential building blocks of AI without each country having to start from scratch. Saurabh Garg draws a direct line between these initiatives and India's own experience with layered digital public infrastructure, pointing to the principles behind Aadhaar, UPI, and the India AI Mission as exactly what informed the working group's approach. The real work, he makes clear, begins now.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

00:31 Overview of the AI Impact Summit

01:24 Guest Introduction: Dr. Saurabh Garg

02:12 Goals of the Working Group

03:40 Ensuring Inclusivity in AI Development

06:04 Common Concerns from Participating Countries

07:49 Consensus Building Process

10:06 Key Outcomes of the Working Group

13:28 Understanding the Collaborative Platform METLI

16:12 India's Domestic AI Mission

19:29 Navigating Data Governance and Sovereignty

20:49 Funding and Sustainability for AI Initiatives

23:25 Immediate Next Steps Post-Summit

25:22 India’s Role in Future AI Development

26:49 Switzerland as the Next Host of the Summit

Every two weeks, Interpreting India brings you diverse voices from India and around the world to explore the critical questions shaping the nation's future. We delve into how technology, the economy, and foreign policy intertwine to influence India's relationship with the global stage.
As a Carnegie India production, hosted by Carnegie scholars, Interpreting India, a Carnegie India production, provides insightful perspectives and cutting-edge by tackling the defining questions that chart India's course through the next decade.
Stay tuned for thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and a deeper understanding of India's place in the world.
Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to join the conversation and be part of Interpreting India's journey.

Almudena opens with a distinction that anchors the entire conversation: space security, unlike space safety, is about intentional harm. It concerns deliberate attempts to disrupt, deny, or destroy space systems and the services they provide, and it is discussed not in Vienna at COPUOS but in forums like the Conference on Disarmament and the UN General Assembly's First Committee in Geneva. AI, she argues, is not new to space systems, having been slowly integrated since the late 1990s for data processing and autonomous operations, but its implications for security are only beginning to surface in multilateral discussions.

On the opportunities AI presents, Almudena is clear: faster data processing for space situational awareness, smarter collision avoidance, more efficient Earth observation, and greater autonomy for robotic explorers in deep space. But she is equally clear about the risks. The black box nature of AI systems adds a layer of opacity to operations that are already difficult to attribute, and in a geopolitically tense environment, opacity contributes to escalation. She walks through a scenario that captures the danger precisely: an adversary feeding incorrect data to an AI system managing satellite manoeuvres, causing it to collide rather than avoid. The AI has not been weaponized in the traditional sense, but the satellite has, and liability under existing frameworks is far from straightforward.

On governance, Almudena resists the temptation to call for an entirely new treaty architecture. The Outer Space Treaty, she argues, was always a treaty of principles, functioning more like a constitution than a rulebook, and its core provisions on non-discrimination, responsibility, and due regard remain relevant in the age of AI. What is needed is not a replacement but a layered approach: applying existing principles thoughtfully, developing non-legally binding norms where binding agreements are politically out of reach, and remaining flexible enough to adapt as the technology evolves. She also flags cyber as the technology deserving the most urgent attention in the near term, given how deeply software-dependent space systems have become and how difficult cyber-attacks are to attribute and deter.

Episode Contributors

Tejas Bharadwaj is a senior research analyst with the Technology and Society Program at Carnegie India. He works on space law and policies, tracking India’s space sector developments as well as issues pertaining to space security and sustainability globally. He also works on AI in military domain, including Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), defense tech partnerships and cybersecurity policies.

Almudena Azcárate Ortega is the lead researcher at UNIDIR's Space Security Programme. She is an experienced space lawyer and policy scholar and has briefed UN member states on the topic of space security law policy and has presented her research in multiple forums.

Every two weeks, Interpreting India brings you diverse voices from India and around the world to explore the critical questions shaping the nation's future. We delve into how technology, the economy, and foreign policy intertwine to influence India's relationship with the global stage.
As a Carnegie India production, hosted by Carnegie scholars, Interpreting India, a Carnegie India production, provides insightful perspectives and cutting-edge by tackling the defining questions that chart India's course through the next decade.
Stay tuned for thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and a deeper understanding of India's place in the world.
Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to join the conversation and be part of Interpreting India's journey.

This episode is part of our special series on the India AI Impact Summit, examining the conversations, decisions, and debates that are shaping global AI governance.

Raymond draws a distinction early in the conversation that shapes everything that follows: training and inference are not the same thing, and conflating them is leading a lot of countries to make expensive mistakes. Training, he says, is like building the engine. Inference is running the transport system every single day. Most countries do not need to build the engine. What they need is airports, roads, and reliable infrastructure that gets the technology into the hands of people. The global assumption that frontier model training is the only legitimate AI pathway is, in his view, one of the more consequential misreads of the moment.

On the ground realities of building in Africa, Raymond is specific about where the bottlenecks actually are. It is not ambition. It is power reliability, cost of connectivity, access to capital, and the kind of financing frameworks that have not yet caught up with what AI infrastructure actually requires. He points to genuinely interesting anomalies, such as Ethiopia's extremely low cost of power sitting alongside very limited terrestrial fiber diversity, as a reminder that building in the Global South is not about replicating Silicon Valley at a discount. It is about finding combinations of constraints that can actually be made to work, and optimising for reliability, cost efficiency, and practical impact rather than scale and prestige.

His advice to governments is to start with problems, not hardware. Prestigious projects with no clear use case, over-regulation before a single GPU cluster exists, and attempts to rebuild sovereign versions of large compute clusters are all, in his view, things to ignore. What countries should actually invest in is reliable and clean power, public interest compute access, data governance frameworks, sector specific pilots in health, agriculture, and education, and talent development that works by getting the technology into the hands of people rather than running structured boot camps. For Raymond, the success metric for Africa in five years should not be the size of anyone's model. It should be whether AI has meaningfully improved economic productivity and public service delivery across the continent.

Episode Contributors

Nidhi Singh is an associate fellow at Carnegie India. Her current research interests include data governance, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Her work focuses on the implications of information technology law and policy from a Global Majority and Asian perspective. 

Raymond Ononiwu is the founder of Horus Lab, a technology and infrastructure company building Africa’s next-generation digital backbone through modular, renewable-powered, AI-ready data centers. An engineer with more than 15 years of experience delivering products across Mixed Reality, Windows Analytics, and Teams Copilot, his work has powered platforms relied on by hundreds of millions globally.

Every two weeks, Interpreting India brings you diverse voices from India and around the world to explore the critical questions shaping the nation's future. We delve into how technology, the economy, and foreign policy intertwine to influence India's relationship with the global stage.
As a Carnegie India production, hosted by Carnegie scholars, Interpreting India, a Carnegie India production, provides insightful perspectives and cutting-edge by tackling the defining questions that chart India's course through the next decade.
Stay tuned for thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and a deeper understanding of India's place in the world.
Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to join the conversation and be part of Interpreting India's journey.

For most of the last decade, a trade deal between India and the EU seemed unlikely. The nudge came as the world changed around both. Nicolas points to three converging forces: the pressure of US tariffs under Trump, which gave both sides political incentive to show they had other partners; the shared interest in reducing dependence on China for critical supply chains; and India's loss of GSP preferential treatment in the EU from January this year, which created a very concrete economic urgency on the Indian side. Together, these forces did what years of diplomatic goodwill could not.

The deal itself is ambitious by India's standards, covering tariff elimination on 96.6% of EU goods exports, significant reductions on cars, wine and spirits, and new services commitments across sectors that were previously off the table. But Nicolas is candid about the gaps. There is no chapter on government procurement, the sustainability provisions lack any real enforcement mechanism, and investment protection has been deferred to a separate negotiation. On the regulatory side, Indian exporters still face the carbon border adjustment mechanism on steel and aluminium, strict food safety standards that have already led to hundreds of rejected shipments, and product testing requirements that a tariff cut alone cannot resolve.

On mobility, Nicolas notes that the framework for Indian professionals is genuinely more promising than what was on offer in the original negotiations, partly because the UK is no longer in the room and partly because Europe's labour market has shifted significantly. But immigration policy remains a national competence, and many EU governments are currently run by or in coalition with parties for whom restricting migration is a core political position. The gap between what Brussels signs and what Vienna or Rome implement could be quite wide, and managing expectations around this will be one of the more delicate parts of the implementation process ahead.

Every two weeks, Interpreting India brings you diverse voices from India and around the world to explore the critical questions shaping the nation's future. We delve into how technology, the economy, and foreign policy intertwine to influence India's relationship with the global stage.
As a Carnegie India production, hosted by Carnegie scholars, Interpreting India, a Carnegie India production, provides insightful perspectives and cutting-edge by tackling the defining questions that chart India's course through the next decade.
Stay tuned for thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and a deeper understanding of India's place in the world.
Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review to join the conversation and be part of Interpreting India's journey.