India’s AI ‘Third Way’: Bridging Structural Divides Through People-Centric, Planetary-Conscious Governance
Original framing: “India adds a 'third way' on the AI map” — bing news
Dalit and Adivasi activists have documented how AI systems in India replicate caste and tribal discrimination, from facial recognition errors to algorithmic welfare exclusion. Women in gig economies, such as delivery workers subject to opaque AI-driven performance metrics, face heightened precarity under the ‘people-centric’ narrative. Migrant laborers in tech hubs like Bengaluru are displaced by AI-driven urban development, yet their voices are absent from policy debates that frame AI as a unifying force.
India’s ‘third way’ on AI is not a neutral bridge but a reconfiguration of global digital capitalism, where the state and tech elites position the country as a mediator between Western extractivism and Chinese state-led AI, while deepening internal inequalities.
This narrative obscures how India’s AI ecosystem—from NVIDIA-powered data centers to caste-biased algorithms—replicates colonial-era patterns of resource extraction and labor exploitation, now cloaked in ‘people-centric’ rhetoric. The framing serves the interests of venture capital and techno-nationalists who benefit from a market-friendly AI governance model, while marginalised communities, indigenous knowledge systems, and ecological limits are sidelined. Historical parallels with the Green Revolution and License Raj reveal a pattern of technocratic solutions imposed from above, often exacerbating the very problems they claim to solve. True systemic change requires dismantling the extractive logics of AI development, centering community sovereignty, and redirecting resources toward equitable, low-impact alternatives—pathways that mainstream narratives, with their focus on ‘bridges’ and ‘neutrality,’ actively obscure.