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
The original framing omits the historical exploitation of India as a testing ground for digital colonialism, from IBM’s early computing dominance to Google’s AI training on Indian datasets without consent. It ignores indigenous data sovereignty movements, such as the Adivasi communities resisting biometric surveillance, and the environmental toll of AI data centers in water-stressed regions like Tamil Nadu. Marginalised perspectives—Dalit laborers in AI content moderation, women in gig economies, and rural communities facing algorithmic discrimination—are erased in favor of a top-down techno-utopian narrative.
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by Western tech media and Indian techno-elites, serving the interests of venture capital, Big Tech, and state-aligned technocrats who benefit from framing AI governance as a ‘neutral’ third path. This obscures the power asymmetries in AI development, where Global South nations are positioned as ‘bridges’ for Western markets rather than sovereign actors. The framing reinforces a techno-solutionist myth that equates governance with market-friendly ‘people-centric’ policies, masking extractive data colonialism and environmental externalities.
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.