India is laying the groundwork for inclusive AI

This article is authored by Ankur Vora, president, Africa & India Offices and chief strategy office, Gates Foundation.

India has a unique opportunity to model what it looks like to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) for good.

Artificial intelligence (Representative)

Record capital is pouring into the country’s AI sector--the Government of India has announced ambitious investments, alongside commitments from domestic companies, including Reliance Industries ($110 billion) and the Adani Group ($100 billion), and global corporations, such as $48 billion from Amazon, $17.5 billion from Microsoft, $15 billion from Google, and more.

As expected, much of the current global conversation about AI investment is focused on competition and security. But an equally important question is whether AI can improve lives--and for whom.

Technology can either widen gaps in quality of life or plug them.

For decades, new technologies have benefited well-resourced communities first, often exclusively. Commercial farms use precise weather models to boost yields, while smallholder farmers lack access to basic forecasting. Students in wealthy schools learn with expensive digital tools, while under-resourced students face teacher shortages. Advanced diagnostics that detect disease early remain unavailable in health clinics that need them most.

AI can tip those scales, delivering faster, less expensive, and more precise solutions to farmers, health workers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and families, but only if it's developed inclusively.

AI that works for everyone requires deliberate choices across government, business, and development. To intentionally mitigate against AI’s risks to jobs, cybersecurity, critical thinking, and more; prioritise social impact alongside scale; design to tackle our greatest challenges; and build with the local community, not merely for them.

This is where India has laid strong foundations and has an opportunity to lead.

India’s ‘AI for All’ vision positions AI as a driver of economic growth, inclusion, and public-system transformation. Its advantage lies in the combination of diverse populations and data, deep engineering talent, and digital public infrastructure (DPI) built to operate at population scale. The opportunity now is to build on this trusted digital foundation, using AI to turn data into more responsive, accessible services for people and frontline providers.

Public investment is anchored in the IndiaAI Mission, spanning compute, datasets, foundation models, applications, skills, startup financing, and safe and trusted AI. Importantly, India is also investing in the building blocks for more inclusive AI: Indigenous-language models, Bhashini to bridge language barriers, and AI Kosh to expand access to data. These investments matter because inclusion is not simply about who can access AI, but whether AI understands the languages, contexts, and realities of the people it is meant to serve.

A broader ecosystem–including the National Institution for Transforming India, Anusandhan National Research Foundation, Department of Biotechnology, Department of Science and Technology, Indian Council of Medical Research, AI Centres of Excellence, state governments, and global partners–is helping translate this ambition into practice.

Agriculture is beginning to show what this looks like. BharatVistaar builds on India’s digital agricultural infrastructure to deliver personalised, voice-first advice services to millions of farmers on weather, prices, crop health, and government schemes.

I recently saw this firsthand. In Andhra Pradesh, a smallholder banana farmer showed me how she uses an AI assistant to get proactive weather updates, analyse images of pest infestation in a timely manner, and dispatch a drone to treat the affected area and save her harvest.

Advances span other key sectors too. In Gujarat, the state I come from, and Rajasthan, our partner Wadhwani AI in partnership with state governments, have leveraged automatic speech recognition tools to assess the oral reading fluency of over six million students, turning an expensive, time-intensive process into minutes and improving literacy outcomes at scale.

In health care, Indian innovators are applying AI to enable earlier detection and continuous monitoring, including in settings where specialists and clinical staff are often stretched. Dozee’s contactless patient monitoring is helping providers spot early health warning signs sooner while Remidio combines AI with portable retinal imaging devices to expand preventative eye care.

These are not incremental improvements. They are force multipliers, shifting care from reactive to proactive, and even preventive, and helping frontline providers identify risk, prioritise patients, and intervene when it matters most.

The task now is to build on these foundations so that inclusive AI moves from promising examples to impact at scale. And so, inclusion becomes the standard for all AI development.

That requires leaders across sectors making those deliberate choices: designing with safety and caution top of mind, directing AI toward local priorities; building with teachers, health workers, farmers, and others closest to challenges, and making it available in local languages.

These choices will advance the goal of Viksit Bharat, India's vision of becoming a fully developed nation by 2047. They are also how we prevent maternal and child deaths, eradicate infectious diseases, and help millions lift themselves out of poverty, the three goals Gates Foundation has set for 2045, and goals India has been pursuing with remarkable progress over the years.

For Gates Foundation, this means expanding support for the Indian partners leading this work, helping locally led solutions reach more people.

At this moment of opportunity, I think about my father, who still runs the community health clinic in Gujarat that he set up, now well into his 80s. In the 1970s, he rode a wave of medical innovation that he put to work for anyone who entered his clinic. He taught me the measure of a tool isn’t whether it works; it’s whether everyone can benefit from it.

Today, we have a generational chance to hold ourselves to that same standard of inclusive growth. Because ultimately, history will not remember the models we built, only whether we used them to save and improve lives.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Ankur Vora, president, Africa & India Offices and chief strategy office, Gates Foundation.