The parliamentary committee on external affairs has asked the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to prepare a public “technology vision and strategy document”, saying it was surprised that India lacks a single written strategy linking technology with its foreign policy. Calling the current approach “fragmentary, piecemeal and ad hoc”, the panel said individual successes cannot substitute for a national vision.
India has risen to third place from seventh globally on the Stanford Global AI Vibrancy Tool, an interactive benchmarking suite developed by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) to compare national AI ecosystems. The paper will focus on safety, humanity, skilling, inclusivity and harm mitigation.
The report said India had significant strengths in artificial intelligence (AI) but still faced gaps in computing power, data centre capacity, access to advanced chips, and private investment in large AI models. However, the committee cautioned that the gap with the US and China remained substantial, calling it “a difference of kind and not only of degree”.
It noted that NITI Aayog’s national AI strategy was drafted before the emergence of large language models and recommended that NITI Aayog and MeitY revise it in consultation with the MEA. The recommendations come as MeitY announced on Thursday that it would release a consultation paper within a month as a precursor to framing AI regulations.
