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In Season 5 of Interpreting India, we continue our exploration of the dynamic forces that will shape India's global standing. At Carnegie India, our diverse lineup of experts will host critical discussions at the intersection of technology, the economy, and international security. Join us as we navigate the complexities of geopolitical shifts and rapid technological advancements. This season promises insightful conversations and fresh perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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Jane opens with a framing that runs through the entire conversation: for Africa, the subsea cable story is not primarily about geopolitics. It is about connecting citizens and translating that connectivity into economic participation. Less than 40% of Africans use the internet, and while infrastructure investments are significant, the benefits tend to concentrate in urban hubs like Nairobi, Lagos, and Cape Town, while rural populations, women, and landlocked countries remain underserved. The 2024 cable cut that affected ten African countries brought into sharp focus just how fragile the system is. Africa has only one dedicated cable repair vessel for the entire continent, and mobilizing it costs millions of dollars and takes days. Jane walks through what is now being put in place: clearer government notification protocols, mandated interconnection between telecom operators, and cross-border coordination frameworks, with West Africa emerging as a model that the rest of the continent has not yet replicated. On Chinese infrastructure, Jane is pragmatic. The framing of east versus west is, in her view, the wrong one for African policymakers who are already deeply invested in Chinese telecom towers, terrestrial fiber, and mobile devices across the continent. The more useful question is how to secure what already exists, ensuring cybersecurity safeguards are in place regardless of where the infrastructure comes from. On the ITU advisory body, whose final report was published in Geneva in July, the recommendations cover coordination, standards, and geographic diversity, but the document is non-binding. The real work, she says, now rests with national governments and regulators to take those recommendations forward. Episode Contributors Charukeshi Bhatt is a research analyst at Carnegie India, where her work focuses on the intersection of emerging technologies and international security. Her current research explores how advancements in technologies such as AI are shaping global disarmament frameworks and security norms. Jane Munga is a Fellow in the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she leads research on technology policy. Her work addresses how African countries can harness digital technologies to advance inclusive and sustainable growth. Her work focuses on the nexus of digital policy, digital partnerships, and developing the foundational elements of digital development. Readings India’s Stake in the Global Subsea Cable Race Subsea Cables, Trusted Networks, and India's Strategic Opportunity 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.
The conversation opens with a useful baseline on both countries. Australia has world-class mining equipment, technology, and services capabilities, and its mining sector contributes roughly 10 to 15 percent of GDP, yet it remains predominantly a raw material exporter with limited domestic demand. India has a large and growing demand for minerals to fuel its manufacturing ambitions, a vast talent pool, and competitive labour and energy costs, but has historically underinvested in systematic exploration, reserve creation, and processing relative to its long-term needs. The complementarity is clear, but Professor Yellishetty is equally clear about what is missing: while government-to-government and university-to-university engagement is working well through mechanisms such as the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, the Ministry of Mines MoU, and KABIL's engagement with Australia's Critical Minerals Facilitation Office, the business-to-business piece On the Australia-India Critical Minerals Research Hub (AICMRH), the conversation traces its origins to a community of practice that came together during the COVID-19 lockdown, eventually growing to around 150 researchers. The Hub has since hosted national symposiums, submitted recommendations to ministries on both sides, and facilitated student exchanges, with institutional partnerships including Monash University's collaborations with IIT Bombay and IIT Hyderabad. Professor Yellishetty notes that the Hub's policy recommendations fed into discussions around India's first critical minerals list and the announcement of Centres of Excellence (CoE) under the National Critical Minerals Mission, launched in 2025. The next step, he argues, is institutionalising this through a Joint Centre of Excellence that can anchor commercial outcomes alongside research, including moving promising technologies such as environmentally benign processing methods like deep eutectic solvents from laboratory to pilot scale and eventually to commercial deployment. Looking ahead, Professor Yellishetty organises the India-Australia opportunity into five buckets: policy and trade, technology research and development, investment and financing, skills and capacity building, and ESG learning. He sees particular promise in co-developing processing technologies rather than simply transferring them, spanning rare earth extraction, lithium value chains, and environmentally safer processing, as well as co-investing in third countries like Indonesia and Vietnam that hold significant mineral reserves. He also situates the bilateral relationship within the wider Quad framework, where Australia contributes mining and ESG expertise, Japan brings capital and downstream processing experience, and the United States offers technology and intellectual property, alongside India's scale and human capital. The ambition, ultimately, is to build India into not just a consumer of critical minerals but a processing hub capable of serving western markets. 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.
Edward lays out three criteria for what makes something a genuine choke point: dominant market share, difficulty to substitute, and the ability to weaponize it with asymmetric impact, hurting the adversary far more than yourself. All three are needed. The U.S. dollar is involved in 90% of foreign exchange transactions. China refines 90% of the global supply of rare earths. Nvidia designs 85% of advanced AI chips. These are all choke points. Canada's dependence on the U.S. market, on the other hand, is not, because imposing embargo-level tariffs on Canada would be just as damaging to the U.S. as to Canada. The distinction, he notes, is not between weaponizing interdependence but weaponizing dependence. On the question of incremental versus decisive action when it comes to what nations can do in response to chokepoints, Edward's view is clear: when you ratchet up sanctions or export controls gradually, the adversary adapts the whole time. The pressure goes up a little, they find workarounds; the impact goes down, and you end up with a zigzagging pattern that is not particularly effective. On semiconductors, he pushes back on the argument that restricting chip exports to China simply incentivizes them to build their own, pointing out that Huawei's chip subsidiary currently holds around 1% of the advanced AI chip market. If the AI race could be decided in the next few years, giving China access to Nvidia chips in the interim would, in his view, be giving ammunition to an adversary in the middle of the most important technology race of our lifetimes. On India, Edward's view is that India has more optionality than almost any other country outside the U.S. and China. He sees deeper economic integration with like-minded partners as the most promising path forward, and thinks India is well positioned to benefit from the current transition in the global economic order. He is also candid that both the U.S. and China use economic coercion, and that it is reasonable for countries like India to factor that in. But when stacking the two up, his view is that the U.S. legal system, with its checks and balances, offers more predictability than the alternative. 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 is the final episode of our special series on the India AI Impact Summit, examining the conversations, decisions, and debates that are shaping global AI governance. This episode explores: India has a clear North Star in Viksit Bharat 2047, but what will it actually take to get there and what role does AI play? Should India focus on diffusing AI or building its own frontier research capability, and is that even the right way to frame the question? What did the working group on AI for Economic Growth and Social Good set out to do, and what is the Global AI Impact Commons designed to deliver? From skilling to last mile delivery, what stands between a great AI solution built in Bangalore and the farmer or district hospital that could benefit from it? Debjani pushes back early on one of the most debated questions in India's AI conversation. The framing of frontier research versus diffusion, she says, is simply the wrong debate. India needs to do both. Without the machinery to convert its own data into intelligence, India would be diffusing imported intelligence, with no guarantee that the channel will always remain open. Building that machinery, while simultaneously deploying AI at scale, is not a choice. It is a necessity. On the working group, the most important conversation was not about technology at all. It was about the human being. Every country in the room was still trying to figure out how to unlock AI's impact at population scale, and the group's key insight was that the world does not yet have a common standard for what impact even means. The Global AI Impact Commons, launched at the summit with over 80 stories from more than 30 countries, is designed to change that, giving countries a shared repository of real world success stories to learn from and replicate. Her advice for getting AI to the last mile draws directly from India's DPI experience. None of the platforms that reached population scale, not Aadhaar, not UPI, started with the technology. They started with the problem. The best AI, she says, is the AI that is invisible. People should not have to think about it. And that principle, starting grassroots up, keeping it simple, and keeping the human at the center, is what India's AI builders need to take forward. 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. Professor Ravindran addresses early on the perception that the India summit sidelined safety. More than 60% of the summit's events and discussions were focused on safety, trust, and cross-border collaboration. The framing shifted, and deliberately so. When the summit came to the Global South, leading with existential risk, rather than the very real opportunity AI presents to improve healthcare, education, and public services for hundreds of millions of people, would have been the wrong entry point. The two key deliverables from his working group reflect that balance: the Trusted AI Commons, a repository of benchmarks, testing protocols, and best practices designed for AI deployment in resource-constrained settings, and a high-level governance guidance note endorsed by 22 countries, that calls out the issues every national AI policy should address without being prescriptive enough to limit how different countries approach it. On frontier risks, Professor Ravindran notes that the landscape has shifted in ways that would have seemed speculative even a year ago, and that the frameworks being built to manage these risks will need to keep pace with that change. He also reflects on what the growing concentration of the most capable AI models means for countries like India, and why that conversation may need to move from being a company-to-country dialogue to a country-to-country one. His overall view is one of cautious optimism: there will be disruption in the short term, but there will also be a new equilibrium, and the work is to make sure the transition is managed well. Episode Contributors Professor Balaraman Ravindran heads the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras. He is also the Founding Head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI (WSAI), Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBCDSAI), and Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras. He has more than three decades of experience working in reinforcement learning, and his research interest spans responsible AI and deep RL. 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. She has previously contributed to the Indian Express, The Secretariat, Medianama and HinduBusiness Line. 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.
Pooja opens with a mismatch that frames the entire conversation. India consumes around 20% of global internet traffic but accounts for just 2% of global subsea cable infrastructure. Even with the expansion of landing stations currently underway, the gap between India's digital ambitions and its physical cable footprint is significant. Part of this is historical: cable infrastructure was concentrated in Mumbai and Chennai, and building it out is prohibitively expensive. Part of it is structural: the raw materials, the technology, and crucially the cable-laying ships that make all of it possible are controlled by a very small number of countries. On the question of China's expanding footprint, Pooja draws out a tension that runs through the whole conversation: private cable companies are driven by cost and scale, and will naturally gravitate towards cheaper components and partners regardless of where they come from. Sovereign concerns around espionage, trusted supply chains, and national security are a different conversation entirely, and the two do not always find a common language easily. This is where the idea of trusted networks becomes important, frameworks built around like-minded partners who share a common understanding of hardware standards, legal norms, and jurisdictional protections. Australia's approach of using its Exclusive Economic Zone provisions to protect cable infrastructure is one model Pooja thinks India should take seriously and preliminary discussions suggest it already is. On Quad, Pooja notes that the cable connectivity and resilience partnership launched at the Leaders’ Summit was significant, and there is work happening beneath the surface even if it is not attracting media attention. She concludes by suggesting that more clarity from the government on where India stands on subsea cables, which bodies are responsible, and the national approach will help the broader conversation, especially aiding relevant stakeholders reach out to the right people within the government. That clarity, she argues, is the essential first step. 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.
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.
This episode is part of our special series on the India AI Impact Summit 2026, examining the conversations, perspectives, and debates that are shaping global AI discourse. Tino has been in the room at all four AI summits, and his account of how the conversation has evolved is both candid and grounding. Bletchley Park, he says, was about putting AI on the agenda as a matter of global significance. Seoul was about bringing the private sector formally into that conversation. Paris marked a pivot towards economic opportunity, reflecting a growing recognition, particularly in Europe, that being seen only as a regulator was not a position anyone wanted to hold for long. And New Delhi brought something none of the previous summits had: scale, and a genuinely different set of questions. Half a million people attended, and the conversations happening on the floor of the convention center were about crop yields, public service delivery, and what the technology meant for jobs and families. That, Tino says, is not a dilution of the AI safety agenda. It is a necessary part of building one that the rest of the world can actually be part of. On the criticism that these summits produce declarations that no one enforces and voluntary commitments that companies quietly walk away from, Tino is pragmatic rather than defensive. He points to the eradication of smallpox, the reduction of nuclear weapons, and the Montreal Protocol as reminders that consequential international progress tends to look messy and incremental from the inside. The network of AI safety institutes that now exists across multiple countries, the UN panel on AI, and the fact that frontier labs are taking evaluation and testing seriously at all, are all, in his view, real if incomplete achievements. The harder question, particularly after the U.S. and UK declined to sign the Paris declaration, is whether the summit process can hold its shape as geopolitical competition intensifies and the appetite for multilateral consensus shrinks. For Geneva, Tino hopes the conversation moves inward, towards understanding how AI is actually changing organizations, families, and daily life at the micro level. He is also candid about risks he thinks are still not being taken seriously enough, particularly around loss of control, pointing to early evidence of models that scheme, misrepresent, and in controlled environments show signs of self-preservation. His overall posture is one of cautious optimism: he does not think the technology should slow down, but he does think the work of aligning it with what is genuinely good for people has barely begun. Chapters 00:00 Introduction 02:18 Introduction to AI Diplomacy 04:07 The Bletchley Park Summit: Hope and Concerns 10:24 Seoul Summit: Concrete Commitments and Challenges 11:58 Paris Summit: Shifting Focus to Action 16:04 Delhi Summit: The Global South Perspective 21:30 Diverse Perspectives: Government, Private Sector, and Civil Society 26:15 Critiques of Summit Effectiveness and Global Cooperation 29:24 Assessing AI's Global Impact 33:45 India's Role in AI Development 39:07 Looking Ahead to the Geneva Summit 43:09 Global Perspectives on AI 47:25 The Future of AI Governance 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.
The conversation begins with a close look at India’s data protection regime, particularly the DPDP Act and its emphasis on consent. Nikhil challenges the perception that the law is overly consent-driven, pointing to a range of exemptions and alternative legal bases for processing data. At the same time, he highlights gaps in enforcement and deterrence, arguing that the current framework may struggle to address large-scale misuse of data or systemic harms. On AI governance, Nikhil makes a case that India does not need a sweeping, EU-style AI law, at least not yet. Given India's legislative pace, enforcement gaps, and how fast AI is evolving, he thinks strengthening existing laws and making targeted amendments is a far more practical path. He does, however, flag artificial intimacy as something that deserves serious attention soon. AI-powered companionship is supercharging the loneliness economy, building emotional dependency at scale, and raising risks that no existing framework is really built to handle. Closer to home, Nikhil offers a window into how AI is changing legal practice at Trilegal, where 75% of lawyers now use AI in their daily workflows. The firm is simultaneously building AI products, using them internally, and advising clients on AI risk, a position Nikhil sees as an advantage rather than a conflict. For him, the era of lawyers who write code and speak directly with engineers is not something to fear but a long overdue shift in what it means to practice technology law. 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. She has previously contributed to the Indian Express, The Secretariat, Medianama and HinduBusiness Line. Nikhil Narendran is a Partner in Trilegal’s Bengaluru office and part of the TMT practice of the firm. He is a subject matter expert in the technology, media, and telecom communication space. Nikhil focuses on the interplay of technology, human lives, and commerce. He has substantial experience in advising companies on telecom, media and technology laws in relation to their entry into India, operations, strategy, policy, regulatory issues, disputes, and business models. 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.
The conversation begins with a look at where the conflict stands today and how Iran has managed to absorb significant military pressure while still responding in a measured way. Dharmendra explains how the conflict has expanded beyond immediate borders, affecting energy flows and drawing in multiple countries, while also reinforcing a sense of internal unity despite economic strain. It then turns to Iran’s internal system, where different power centres, from the political leadership to the security establishment, continue to function together even under pressure. The episode also reflects on the role of nationalism, suggesting that even in a deeply ideological state, a shared national identity plays a strong role in shaping public response during moments of crisis. In the final part, the focus shifts to India. The discussion looks at how India manages its relationships across the region, from Iran to the Gulf, and the constraints created by sanctions and global politics. It also touches on long-term projects like Chabahar and what their future might look like. The episode closes with a broader reflection on where the region may be headed and what space there is for stability after the conflict. Episode Contributors Srinath Raghavan is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie India. He is also a professor of International Relations and History at Ashoka University. His primary research focus is on the contemporary and historical aspects of India’s foreign and security policies. Gaddam Dharmendra is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie India. He joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1990 and served in various capacities in Indian Missions across the world and at the Ministry of External Affairs, South Block. His overseas assignments include stints at Indian Missions in Tehran, Dushanbe, Washington D.C., and Dhaka. 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.
The episode begins with a reflection on Brazil’s 2025 BRICS presidency, which emphasized continuity with the bloc’s original reformist agenda—particularly the push for reform of global financial institutions and greater representation for emerging economies. While Brazil focused on trade facilitation, climate finance, and taxation cooperation, progress on deeper monetary coordination and mechanisms such as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement remained limited. Ana Garcia also notes the gap between expectations and reality within BRICS. Despite its growing geopolitical visibility, the bloc has struggled to develop unified responses to global crises and remains economically imbalanced, with intra-BRICS trade heavily centered on China. The New Development Bank continues to expand its project financing and local currency lending but operates within global financial constraints and plays a more limited role than often perceived. Looking ahead, India’s presidency will focus on consolidating the expanded BRICS grouping while cautiously advancing financial cooperation, climate adaptation financing, and South-South collaboration in health. The discussion concludes that India’s success will depend on pragmatic institutional progress rather than ambitious rhetoric, as BRICS navigates a complex and polarized global environment. Episode Contributors Vrinda Sahai is a research analyst in the Security Studies Program at Carnegie India. Her work focuses on Indian foreign and security policy, particularly, India’s strategic engagement with major powers. Ana Elisa Saggioro Garcia is a Professor at the Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio. Professor of the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. PhD in International Relations from IRI/PUC-Rio and Master in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin (Germany). 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.
Kumar frames the India–EU FTA as a deal India needed, not one it merely chose, arguing that with the multilateral trade system weakened, FTAs have become the practical route to secure market access and signal openness to investment. He places the EU among India’s “$100 billion club” trading partners and explains why this agreement fills a gap India cannot realistically close with China, and cannot replicate with the United States in the form of a full FTA. On timing, he calls the early 2010s a missed opportunity but notes that current geopolitical conditions have raised India’s value for Europe, including Europe’s push to de-risk from China and the absence of an EU–U.S. FTA. A major thread is regulation: Kumar acknowledges the EU’s regulatory intensity, but argues India must adapt to global technical and sanitary standards, using the agreement’s timelines and technical assistance to reduce friction and help industry upgrade over time. He clarifies the trade-offs that made the deal viable: core agriculture and dairy are left out due to political sensitivities on both sides; government procurement is excluded due to India’s constraints and federal realities; and investment protection and geographical indications are kept on separate tracks to avoid a more complex EU-wide ratification path. He also describes how negotiations manage domestic sensitivities through consultation with industry, transition periods, tariff-rate quotas, and product thresholds, particularly in sectors like autos, aiming to expose firms gradually to competition while pushing manufacturing to become more competitive. In closing, Kumar argues the hard work starts after signing. He stresses that Indian industry must actually use the agreement’s tariff concessions, pointing to historically low utilization of FTAs—and that domestic reforms cannot be postponed if India wants the deal to deliver results. He highlights reforms in agriculture, labor implementation, power, and land acquisition, and ties this to a broader shift he sees globally: trade policy and security policy are increasingly moving into alignment, especially in a world of dual-use technology and tighter strategic partnerships. Episode Contributors Dinakar Peri is a fellow in the Security Studies program at Carnegie India. Ambassador Mohan Kumar has an outstanding career in the Indian Foreign Service lasting 36 years which culminated in his being India’s Ambassador to France based in Paris. Under his watch, the Indo-French strategic partnership was strengthened and consolidated further in spheres such as defense, space, nuclear & solar energy, smart cities and investment. Earlier, Mohan Kumar was India’s Ambassador to the Kingdom of Bahrain where he witnessed and dealt with a strategically complex region characterized by events such as the “Arab Spring”. 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.
AI progress is often measured by the number of pilots launched, but this episode argues the real unit of progress should be how many AI use cases are reliably in production and embedded into everyday systems. Shalini Kapoor distinguishes AI innovation (models, chips, and breakthroughs) from AI adoption, emphasizing that adoption is frequently harder because it demands institutional integration, behavior change, and clear accountability—especially when AI advice affects livelihoods, health outcomes, or legal decisions. Tanvi Lall explains “pilot purgatory” as the frustrating middle state where use cases never move beyond controlled deployments. She shares how recurring barriers—compute constraints within real institutions (not just cloud credits), fragmented workflows, late-stage safety design, lack of sustained funding, and weak organizational readiness—prevent diffusion. The conversation highlights the UCAF approach to defining a use case as a commitment to improve a specific outcome for a specific persona in a specific context, and why trust and accountability are as central as the technology layer. The episode also explores “horizontal enablers” that make scale possible—data readiness, multilingual language support, voice interfaces for last-mile access, workforce integration, and guardrails. A detailed example (Mahavistar in Maharashtra) illustrates what scaling can look like when government partnership, data pipelines, voice infrastructure, safeguards, and long-term funding align. Finally, the guests look ahead to what AI adoption in India could look like over the next five years, arguing that the most impactful AI will feel “ordinary”—quietly embedded into routine decisions—supported by shared adoption infrastructure rather than one-off pilots. Episode Contributors Nidhi Singh is a Senior Research Analyst at Carnegie India. Shalini Kapoor is the Chief Strategist for Data and AI at the EkStep Foundation. Her work focuses on building practical pathways for AI adoption, with emphasis on institutional integration, accountable systems, and population-scale impact. Tanvi Lall is the Director for Strategy at People Plus AI. Her work focuses on AI use cases, adoption barriers, and developing frameworks that help move AI from pilots to sustained deployment and real-world outcomes. 00:00 Introduction to AI Adoption Challenges 01:37 Understanding AI Adoption vs. Innovation 04:55 Pilot Purgatory: The Stagnation of AI Projects 08:48 Fragmented Adoption: Real-World Examples 12:13 Barriers to AI Adoption: Mindset and Behavior Change 16:01 Defining Good AI Use Cases 20:00 Horizontal Enablers for AI Success 26:26 Case Study: Mahavistar's Impact on Farmers 34:34 Future of AI Adoption in India 40:29 Optimism for AI Diffusion and Adoption Readings AI Adoption Journey for Population Scale by Shalini Kapoor and Tanvi Lall 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.
As AI systems grow more powerful, the computational infrastructure behind them has become a strategic resource, one that is unevenly distributed across the world. This episode takes a deep look at the three layers of compute sovereignty: where data centers are located, who owns them, and who manufactures the chips that power them. Zoe explains how access to compute has quickly shifted from a technical issue to a core question of economic resilience and sovereignty. The conversation unpacks new research showing how few countries actually host advanced AI-relevant data centers, and how global dependencies on companies like Nvidia shape strategic decisions. Adarsh and Zoe discuss the implications for countries that are “compute deserts,” the growing push toward sovereign capabilities, and why a binary view of sovereignty is misleading. They also explore how countries are attempting to secure compute, through public investment, regional collaborations, and new transnational initiatives. Finally, the episode examines the emerging tension between the pursuit of compute sovereignty and the environmental and socioeconomic costs of data centers. As global investments flow into AI infrastructure, Zoe argues for a more grounded, people-centric approach to AI strategy, one that balances access, sustainability, and long-term national priorities amid evolving questions about the future of the AI industry. Episode Contributors 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. Zoe Jay Hawkins is the co-founder and deputy executive director of the Tech Policy Design Institute. Zoe brings extensive experience designing tech policy from government, big tech, academic and think tank perspectives. Zoe worked for the Australian government across communications, innovation, and foreign policy portfolios, as a ministerial adviser and in the public service. She is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford and an expert researcher for the OECD, having started her career at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. 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.
The conversation explores how cybersecurity is integral to space operations, drawing parallels with traditional air defense strategies. Blount discusses the historical context of cybersecurity in space, the role of international law, and the challenges posed by non-state actors. He emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to cybersecurity that includes both space-based and terrestrial components, and the importance of international cooperation in addressing these challenges. Blount warns of the increasing threats from cyber-attacks on space assets and the need for robust legal frameworks to ensure accountability and security. He calls for the development of comprehensive cybersecurity strategies that integrate space and cyberspace, ensuring resilience against a wide range of threats. How can nations protect their space assets from cyber threats? What role does international law play in governing space cybersecurity? How should countries collaborate to enhance global space security? Episode Contributors P. J. Blount is assistant professor of space law at Durham University. He is also a visiting scholar at Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Rai, Thailand. Previously, he served as a Lecturer in Law at Cardiff University, an adjunct professor for the LL.M. in the Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg, an adjunct professor at Montclair State University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Beijing Institute of Technology School of Law. Tejas Bharadwaj is a senior research analyst with the Technology and Society Program at Carnegie India. He focuses on space law and policies and also works on areas related to AI in military domain, Defence tech and Cybersecurity. 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.
The episode challenges the familiar “open versus closed” framing of AI systems. Sharma argues that openness is not inherently good or bad—it is an instrumental choice that should align with specific policy goals. She introduces a seven-part taxonomy of AI—compute, data, source code, model weights, system prompts, operational records and controls, and labor—to show how each component interacts differently with innovation, safety, and governance. Her central idea, differential openness, suggests that each component can exist along a spectrum rather than being entirely open or closed. For instance, a company might keep its training data private while making its system prompts partially accessible, allowing transparency without compromising competitive or national interests. Using the example of companion bots, Sharma highlights how tailored openness across components can enhance safety and oversight while protecting user privacy. She urges policymakers to adopt this nuanced approach, applying varying levels of openness based on context—whether in public services, healthcare, or defense. The episode concludes by emphasizing that understanding these layers is vital for shaping balanced AI governance that safeguards public interest while supporting innovation. How can regulators determine optimal openness levels for different components of AI systems? Can greater transparency coexist with innovation and competitive advantage? What governance structures can ensure that openness strengthens democratic accountability without undermining safety or national security? Episode Contributors Chinmayi Sharma is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School in New York. She is a nonresident fellow at the Stoss Center, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Atlantic Council. She serves on Microsoft’s Responsible AI Committee and the program committees for the ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law and the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Shruti Mittal is a research analyst at Carnegie India. Her current research interests include artificial intelligence, semiconductors, compute, and data governance. She is also interested in studying the potential socio-economic value that open development and diffusion of technologies can create in the Global South. Suggested Readings Unbundling AI Openness by Parth Nobel, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, and Chinmayi Sharma. Tragedy of the Digital Commons by Chinmayi Sharma. India’s AI Strategy: Balancing Risk and Opportunity by Amlan Mohanty and Shatakratu Sahu. 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.
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