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India’s digital journey is a story of bold, radical choices. We built public infrastructure to serve a billion people, leading by the adoption of global technologies. Aadhaar created a universal identity layer that opened up financial inclusion for millions of people. UPI expanded on this foundation, creating frictionless rails for value exchange and revolutionizing payments on a scale the world had never seen. Now, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is set to transform e-commerce while providing a level playing field for small businesses.
This India Stack philosophy of building an open, interoperable and nationally owned digital backbone has been our greatest strategic asset. This allows private innovation to flourish on our terms, creating a vibrant ecosystem that is both competitive and flexible.
Today, we stand on the threshold of the next great technological transformation: Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is rapidly evolving into the new intelligence layer of our economy, a cognitive fabric influencing decisions in finance, healthcare, logistics and governance. Once again, we face a critical choice: will we rent this intelligence from a handful of global providers, or will we build the capacity to shape our own cognitive future? For a country of India’s scale and ambition, the answer is clear. We must build.
For the past decade, the default approach for most enterprises has been to consume AI as a service from large international players. This is a black box model: we provide the data and receive the output, but the complex machinery including the model architecture, training data and governance rules remains opaque and out of our control. What started as a convenience has come at a heavy and rising cost, creating deep strategic dependencies.
This dependence creates several concrete risks. First, it makes us aware of algorithmic bias. Models trained primarily on Western datasets often fail to capture the unique complexities of India, including its diverse languages, dialects and cultural contexts. An AI tool that performs well for retail banking in New York may make serious errors when assessing credit risk for a farmer in rural Maharashtra. Second, it leads to high cost fluctuations and vendor lock-in. Imagine a fast-growing Indian startup that is building its entire customer service operations on proprietary AI APIs, but suddenly faces a 300% price increase that cripples its business model. There is no leverage when there are no options.
Finally, and most critically, it presents a geopolitical and supply chain risk. In an increasingly fragmented world, access to critical technology must be ensured. Just as nations protect energy supplies or semiconductor production, we must now think in terms of intelligence security. Relying on foreign-hosted black-box models for critical infrastructure from power grids to financial markets creates a strategic vulnerability we cannot afford. The era of mercenary intelligence, with all its hidden risks, is no longer sustainable. Fortunately, the rise of powerful open-weight models, rapidly expanding sovereign models, and increasingly accessible computing infrastructure provides us with the tools to forge our own path, bring clarity, and move beyond the black box.
To secure our digital future, the national mission needs to evolve from Make-in-India for manufacturing to Build-in-India for intelligence. The first focused on building factories and physical capacity. The second is about creating a sovereign intelligence infrastructure that can power the digital economy of the entire country.
This approach is not about building a single, monolithic Indian AI. Instead, it is about fostering an open, modular and vibrant ecosystem defined by choice and flexibility. A sovereign AI control plane would act as a national foundry for intelligence, enabling enterprises to:
Access a curated list of models: Host a range of the world’s best open-weight frontier models, along with powerful models developed in India and trained on local datasets.
Prevent vendor lock-in: Establish interoperability standards that allow businesses to seamlessly switch between model providers, promoting real competition on price and performance.
Enable local fine-tuning: Provide tools for an agritech startup to adapt a base model to identify crop diseases specific to the Indian climate, or tools for a hospital to improve accuracy in reading medical scans for Indian physiology.
Ensure data sovereignty: Guarantee that sensitive Indian data is processed and stored within national borders while upholding privacy and security mandates.
This approach transforms AI from a high-cost, high-risk import into a democratic, accessible utility. It lowers barriers to entry and empowers the new generation of Indian startups, researchers and public institutions to innovate on a secure and sovereign foundation.
The benefits of a Build-in-India AI strategy are vast and multidimensional, creating a virtuous circle of economic and strategic benefits.
Economically, local governance over AI dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership. This frees enterprises from the unpredictable pricing of global monopolies and allows them to create more efficient, context-aware solutions. More importantly, it will boost a high-value domestic AI industry, create jobs for AI engineers, data scientists and ethicists and position India as an exporter of specialized AI solutions.
Strategically, the benefits are even more profound. For regulated sectors like banking and healthcare, a sovereign AI framework provides the ultimate assurance: auditability. Regulators like RBI can achieve complete transparency on how the models used to make lending decisions were trained and tested while ensuring compliance with Indian laws and ethical guidelines. This builds institutional trust and guarantees that as the power of AI grows, it remains accountable.
UPI demonstrated how open digital infrastructure can unlock competition and reduce costs. A sovereign AI control plane would extend that model to intelligence, fostering a resilient, self-reliant ecosystem and ensuring India’s digital autonomy for decades to come.
Some worry that a focus on sovereignty could slow innovation. In practice, a well-designed sovereign framework speeds this up. By providing access to pre-validated models, secure data environments, and easy-to-use fine-tuning tools, it reduces risk and shortens the time needed to bring new AI applications to market. In this sense, sovereignty becomes a powerful competitive advantage.
Achieving this vision requires a concerted effort across the country. It is a national mandate:
Policy should support open standards for interoperability, fund fundamental model research, and create sandboxes for responsible innovation.
Industry leaders must look beyond short-term pilots and view sovereign AI as a long-term strategic investment in resilience and competitiveness.
Technology providers must provide the platforms and infrastructure that make this vision a reality, delivering sovereignty as a seamless, high-performance and accessible service.
Build-in-India for AI is the cornerstone of our country’s competitiveness, security and prosperity in the coming cognitive age. Now is the time to build our intelligent future.
This article is written by Sharad Sanghi, CEO and Co-Founder, Neysa.
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