The Economic Survey has pitched a distinctly Indian approach to artificial intelligence, calling for the creation of an "AI-OS", a public digital infrastructure for AI, on the lines of UPI and Aadhaar to ensure innovation is broad-based and affordable.
The survey notes that the global AI ecosystem has split into two paths. While the West has pursued a top-down model dominated by a handful of hyperscalers building frontier AI systems backed by massive private capital and computing power, countries like India are better suited to a bottom-up strategy focused on application-driven innovation.
India, the survey argues, brings clear strengths to the table. It is among the top global contributors to AI research, has one of the world's most AI-literate workforces, and possesses vast, diverse domestic data across sectors such as health, agriculture, education and public administration. However, limited access to cutting-edge compute infrastructure and scarce capital for large-scale model training make a race for frontier models both costly and impractical.
Instead, the survey calls for prioritising smaller, application-specific AI models that are cheaper to build, easier to fine-tune, and capable of running on existing hardware like smartphones and personal computers. Such an approach would allow startups, research institutions, public agencies and sectoral firms to participate in AI development without facing high entry barriers.
A key pillar of this strategy is open-source innovation. With India already home to one of the world's largest open-source developer communities, the survey recommends unifying these efforts under the IndiaAI Mission to reduce dependence on foreign proprietary systems and lower costs.
To coordinate this decentralised ecosystem, the survey proposes an ‘AI-OS' initiative, with the sovereign acting as a stakeholder. This would involve pooling data centre capacity, expanding access to anonymised datasets, and creating shared platforms, including a government-hosted code repository, to turn AI into a public good that can scale across sectors. Interestingly, MeitY has already launched AI Kosha, a platform providing access to datasets, models, and tools to accelerate AI innovation in India.
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