India's Ambitious Vision: Human-Machine Synergy for a Prosperous Future

India aims to position itself as a leading example where human abundance and machine intelligence reinforce each other, necessitating political will, state capacity, and a collaborative national strategy. Key issues include education reform, employment in IT, and strategic thinking around data to fuel growth and stability.

At the AI Impact Summit 2026, India's Chief Economic Advisor, V Anantha Nageswaran, emphasized the potential for India to become a society where machine learning and human resources work in tandem to enhance prosperity. He highlighted the necessity of political will, state capacity, and national commitment to align technological advancements with mass employability, underscoring the need for collaborative efforts from the private sector, academia, and policymakers.

Nageswaran argued that for India, the debate extends beyond the future of work to considerations about growth, social stability, and cohesion. He called for immediate reform in education and the delivery of foundational skills as the starting point for aligning AI and employability. This strategy, he explained, would pave the way for creating prosperity in the AI era.

Vineet Nayyar, Founder Chairman and CEO of Sampark Foundation, stressed the importance of employment generation in India's IT sector, cautioning that Indian companies are inherently profit-driven. He argued that mass-scale startups, a focus of the government, are crucial for job creation. Nayyar also highlighted the need for strategic advancements in developing world-class LLM models and safeguarding data to avoid losing valuable opportunities to global competitors.

(With inputs from agencies.)