India AI Governance Guidelines:
MeitY has released the India AI Governance Guidelines—a national, pro-innovation framework to enable safe, trusted AI adoption across sectors.
- A four-part governance blueprint that balances rapid AI adoption with safety, trust, and accountability—without a heavy, one-size-fits-all law.
- Published by Drafted for the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) by a committee constituted in July 2025.
- Aim is to Advance Viksit Bharat 2047 goals by democratizing AI benefits while mitigating harms like deepfakes, bias, and security threats through agile, sector-aware governance.
Key features in the guidelines:
- Seven Sutras (principles): Trust; People First; Innovation over Restraint; Fairness & Equity; Accountability; Understandable by Design; Safety, Resilience & Sustainability.
- Six Pillars: Infrastructure; Capacity Building; Policy & Regulation; Risk Mitigation; Accountability; Institutions.
- Action Plan with timelines: Short/medium/long-term steps—standards, incident systems, sandboxes, legal gap-fixes, DPI-AI integration.
- Institutional architecture: AI Governance Group (AIGG), supported by a Technology & Policy Expert Committee (TPEC); AI Safety Institute (AISI) for testing, standards, and safety R&D.
- Pro-innovation, sector-led regulation: Use existing laws; add targeted amendments (e.g., IT Act classifications, copyright/TDM, DPDP rules) rather than an over-arching AI Act now.
- Risk tools: India-specific risk taxonomy, AI incident database, voluntary commitments, techno-legal measures (watermarking/provenance, privacy-enhancing tech, DEPA-style consent for training), human-in-the-loop for loss-of-control risks.
- Accountability levers: Graded liability by role/risk, transparency reports, grievance redressal, peer and auditor oversight.
- Enablement at scale: Compute/data access (AIKosh, subsidised GPUs), DPI-first solutions, MSME incentives and toolkits.
