New Delhi, Feb 24 (NationPress) During the recent AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized that India utilized its rich civilizational heritage to propose essential organizing principles: data sovereignty, inclusive design, and accountability by default.

Referencing a post on X by Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, PM Modi noted the summit's significant attendance, featuring over 20 heads of state and more than 500 AI innovators from 100+ nations, marking it as the largest assembly of its kind in the Global South.

According to Puri, under PM Modi’s guidance, India became the first nation in the Global South to host a global AI summit series, which did not merely facilitate discussions but established a competitive framework: the Delhi Declaration. This declaration aims to redefine AI governance rules, enhance digital infrastructure capable of processing nearly half of the world’s real-time payments, secure multi-billion-dollar investments, develop sovereign models from the ground up, and integrate into the AI supply chain security landscape.

Puri also underscored the Prime Minister's MANAV vision: ensuring ethical boundaries, responsible governance, and data sovereignty to prevent the exploitation of intelligence as a mere commodity. This vision aims to ensure that benefits reach everyone, from farmers in Madhya Pradesh to engineers in Bengaluru, while also ensuring that all deployed systems undergo democratic evaluation.

Furthermore, the Prime Minister's approach of allowing AI to have an 'open sky' while maintaining human oversight sets a precedent that many advanced economies have hesitated to embrace.

The principles outlined in the Delhi Declaration now carry significant multilateral importance, being recognized as the first substantial AI governance framework from the Global South. This framework emphasizes a development-centric perspective, rooted in a techno-legal methodology that promotes adaptable guidelines over strict compliance, and aligns global collaboration around three key areas: people, planet, and progress.

Population-centric initiatives like BharatGen, which supports 22 Indian languages, acknowledge the linguistic diversity of the world beyond English.

A proposed global computational bank, inspired by India’s subsidized GPU access priced at Rs 65 per hour, aims to lower barriers for entry globally. Puri highlighted that advocating for data sovereignty actively challenges the practice of AI extractivism, where the data of developing nations is harvested to train models that they must subsequently pay to utilize.