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India's remarkable progress with the AI for Bharat initiative, closely linked with the government-backed Bhashini platform, has emerged as a key example of how digital public infrastructure can transform AI accessibility, said Keyzom Massally, Head of Digital & AI Programmes at UNDP on Wednesday.
Speaking to ANI on the sidelines of the Carnegie Global Technology Summit 2025, Keyzom Massally said, "Today, major technology players such as Google and Paytm are already offering services in multiple Indic languages, a shift enabled by these public datasets, language models and open digital rails." "Such similar public rails need to emerge across the world because that is going to make AI more inclusive and certainly for us to make AI more safer, because we can build-in the right safety tooling, the right benchmarks and so on into these public rails," she said. "This linguistic empowerment is not just a technological achievement but a foundational digital public good that broadens participation and ensures AI reaches citizens in their own languages," she highlighted. She also talked about the need for collaboration to scale saying, "We've heard from countries in Africa, in Latin America, Bhutan in the neighbourhood, among others. Majorly, the responses focus on the need to create more collaborations." "Collaborations that is not just one meeting, but collaborations that's a network. Only in a network we can create access and affordability of compute," she added. Massally highlighted UNDP's ongoing "AI Sprint," an initiative spanning more than 60 countries to support governments in developing AI strategies, digitizing local languages, and strengthening trust and safety mechanisms. She noted a growing demand from governments for executive boot camps to help cabinet leaders understand how to right-size investments in data infrastructure and avoid one-size-fits-all "hyperscale" models. She also drew attention to sustainability and resource strategy, urging countries to explore powering data centers through renewable energy and responsibly leveraging critical mineral resources that underpin global AI infrastructure. India, which is championing the AI Impact Summit, is already convening voices from 25 Global South nations in pre-summit dialogues. According to Massally, India's ability to pilot scalable, human-centric, and safe AI experiments positions it as a key leader in shaping inclusive AI governance. Carnegie India will host the Global Technology Summit (GTS), an innovation dialogue on December 11 in New Delhi as an official pre-summit event for the upcoming AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled to be held in New Delhi from February 15-20, 2026. (ANI)
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