From Panini to the AI stack Delhi’s AI moment and the logic of National capability
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Hardeep S Puri
Contd from previous issue
Ensuring that this investment becomes long-term structural advantage is the purpose of the Union Budget for 2026-27, which extends a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign companies using Indian data centres for global cloud services and commits USD 1.1 billion to a venture capital fund for AI and advanced manufacturing startups. The National Critical Mineral Mission, at over ¹ 34,000 crore, secures the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that AI and semiconductor manufacturing depend on.
None of this matters, however, unless it reaches people. On the first day of the Summit, more than 2.5 lakh students took a pledge to use AI for responsible innovation, a number submitted for Guinness World Records recognition. Thirty Data and AI Labs are operational in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the first wave of a planned 570-lab network, while AIKosh offers over 7,500 datasets and 273 models as shared public infrastructure. When this government took office India had 16 IITs; today there are 23. OpenAI’s CEO disclosed that India is ChatGPT’s second largest market, with 100 million weekly active users. The consumption is here, and the production capability is catching up: three sovereign AI models were unveiled at the summit, including Sarvam AI’s 105-billion-parameter large language model trained entirely on Indian compute and BharatGen’s Param2, a 17-billion- parameter multi- lingual model supporting all 22 scheduled languages. These are not fine-tuned adaptations of foreign models; they are built from scratch on sovereign infrastructure.
Equally telling is how partnerships are now structured, because they are no longer about licensing foreign technology but about co-building sovereign capacity. The Tata Group’s strategic partnership with OpenAI, beginning with 100 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity under the Stargate initiative and scaling to one gigawatt, signals that Indian industry is moving from the demand side to the supply side of global intelligence. India’s formal signing of the Pax Silica Declaration on the sidelines of the summit places it in the US-led coalition securing supply chains for AI, semiconductors, and critical minerals alongside Japan, South Korea, the UK, and Australia. The bilateral India-US AI Opportunity Partnership, signed alongside, commits both nations to pro-innovation approaches on critical technologies, while the India-France Year of Innovation in 2026 adds another axis organised around joint skilling and measurable outcomes.
Under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, the first Global South nation to host the global AI summit series did not merely convene a conversation but laid out the terms on which it intends to compete: a Delhi Declaration that rewrites the rules of AI governance, digital infrastructure processing nearly half the world’s real-time payments, investment commitments in the hundreds of billions, sovereign models built from scratch, and entry into the supply chain security architecture of the AI age. Panini’s lesson was never complicated. Structure is intelligence. India is building that structure now.
The writer is Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, PIB
Contd from previous issue
Ensuring that this investment becomes long-term structural advantage is the purpose of the Union Budget for 2026-27, which extends a tax holiday until 2047 for foreign companies using Indian data centres for global cloud services and commits USD 1.1 billion to a venture capital fund for AI and advanced manufacturing startups. The National Critical Mineral Mission, at over ¹ 34,000 crore, secures the lithium, cobalt, and rare earths that AI and semiconductor manufacturing depend on.
None of this matters, however, unless it reaches people. On the first day of the Summit, more than 2.5 lakh students took a pledge to use AI for responsible innovation, a number submitted for Guinness World Records recognition. Thirty Data and AI Labs are operational in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, the first wave of a planned 570-lab network, while AIKosh offers over 7,500 datasets and 273 models as shared public infrastructure. When this government took office India had 16 IITs; today there are 23. OpenAI’s CEO disclosed that India is ChatGPT’s second largest market, with 100 million weekly active users. The consumption is here, and the production capability is catching up: three sovereign AI models were unveiled at the summit, including Sarvam AI’s 105-billion-parameter large language model trained entirely on Indian compute and BharatGen’s Param2, a 17-billion- parameter multi- lingual model supporting all 22 scheduled languages. These are not fine-tuned adaptations of foreign models; they are built from scratch on sovereign infrastructure.
Equally telling is how partnerships are now structured, because they are no longer about licensing foreign technology but about co-building sovereign capacity. The Tata Group’s strategic partnership with OpenAI, beginning with 100 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity under the Stargate initiative and scaling to one gigawatt, signals that Indian industry is moving from the demand side to the supply side of global intelligence. India’s formal signing of the Pax Silica Declaration on the sidelines of the summit places it in the US-led coalition securing supply chains for AI, semiconductors, and critical minerals alongside Japan, South Korea, the UK, and Australia. The bilateral India-US AI Opportunity Partnership, signed alongside, commits both nations to pro-innovation approaches on critical technologies, while the India-France Year of Innovation in 2026 adds another axis organised around joint skilling and measurable outcomes.
Under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, the first Global South nation to host the global AI summit series did not merely convene a conversation but laid out the terms on which it intends to compete: a Delhi Declaration that rewrites the rules of AI governance, digital infrastructure processing nearly half the world’s real-time payments, investment commitments in the hundreds of billions, sovereign models built from scratch, and entry into the supply chain security architecture of the AI age. Panini’s lesson was never complicated. Structure is intelligence. India is building that structure now.
The writer is Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, PIB