The New Delhi AI Summit- Crafting a Sutra for a Digital Humanity through Innovation

by Rameesh Kailasam, CEO Indiatech.org

February 2026 is witnessing an AI filled New Delhi becoming the definitive center of the digital universe. As the India AI Impact Summit kicks off at the sprawling Bharat Mandapam, the city isn’t just hosting a tech conference, it is staging a geopolitical manifesto.

While the previous summits in Bletchley Park in the UK, Seoul, and Paris laid the foundation for the global AI conversations, the New Delhi Summit represents a fundamental shift in gravity. Earlier ones were about the philosophy of AI, Delhi is about its practicality and impact. The theme, “Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya” (Welfare for all, Happiness for all), signals that for India, AI is not a luxury for the laboratory but needs to also be a utility for the masses.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who personally announced this summit at the France AI Action Summit, has curated a "Big Tent" event that bridges the widening "AI Divide." The guest list is a rare alignment of Silicon Valley’s high order and the Global South’s decision-makers. While all the tech titans from US are present there are also over 100 countries participating including over  20 heads of government and 50 international ministers marking this as the first major global AI summit hosted in the Global South.

For the Indian startup ecosystem, this summit is a coming-out party. Under the India AI Mission, the government has attempted to democratize the fuel of AI which is compute. With over 34,000 GPUs provisioned at subsidized rates (less than $1/hour), the aim is to ensure that Indian founders are no longer crippled by the high costs that once kept them in the shadow of Western global giants.

At the AI Impact Expo, the world is seeing technologies that aren't just chatbots but do-bots. Real-time translation tools that break the English barrier for 700 million internet users, Sovereign LLMs and indigenous foundational models trained on local datasets to respect cultural nuances. Precision Agriculture AI tools that provide voice-based assistance to farmers in regional languages. The message to Indian startups is clear, solve for India first, and you will find you have solved for the next four billion people in the developing world.

Geopolitically, the summit represents India’s "Third Way" in technology governance. While the US prioritizes innovation and the EU prioritizes regulation, India is prioritizing Scale and Inclusion.

By anchoring the summit on the Three Sutras (People, Planet, Progress) and the Seven Chakras (from Human Capital to Safe AI), India is positioning itself as the voice of the Global South. It is challenging the concentration of AI power in a few Northern hubs, arguing that AI resources—compute, data, and models—should be treated as Global Public Goods. This is a strategic move to ensure that developing nations "leapfrog" traditional developmental hurdles rather than becoming mere data colonies for Global Tech.

India takes immense pride in its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The summit demonstrates how AI can be layered over existing systems like UPI and Aadhaar to deliver governance at a scale the world has never seen. The fact that the GPAI Council is meeting here confirms India’s transition from a technology consumer to a global rule-setter.

However, the path is fraught with risks that New Delhi must be wary of. While "Frontier AI" grabs headlines, India must stay grounded in "Applied AI." Investing billions in chasing General Intelligence could drain resources from solving immediate problems like healthcare access or agriculture and climate resilience.

India is also being affected by the "Deepfake Epidemic" and as the government notifies the 2026 IT Amendment Rules targeting "Synthetically Generated Information" (SGI), it must ensure  strategic autonomy to build its own sovereign compute capacity to ensure it isn't vulnerable to shifts in global supply chains or chip-export bans.

Ultimately, the Delhi Summit is a reminder that AI is a human story. By focusing on "Human Capital" and "Inclusion for Social Empowerment," India is attempting to steer the technology away from being a tool of displacement and toward being a tool of augmentation.

With PM Modi himself at the plenary, the vision is not just about faster code or smarter chips. It is about every Indian upto the grass root level being able to leverage and economically grow in this AI space. The world is watching, and for the first time in the AI race, the Global South isn't just in the audience, it’s leading the stage. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision has transformed this event from a standard industry conference into a "Big Show" designed to assert India's role as the bridge between the high-tech ambitions of the North and the urgent developmental needs of the Global South.