India’s AI push risks replicating colonial tech extraction—local resistance exposes neoliberal governance gaps
Original framing: “Modi wants India to power the AI age. Residents are pushing back - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Dalit and Adivasi women in Tamil Nadu’s *Kadambur* village protest AI-driven ‘smart agriculture’ that displaces their seed-saving practices. *Migrant workers* in Bengaluru’s AI hubs earn $1.5/day labeling training data, while CEOs profit—echoing *Bonded Labor* systems. *Transgender communities* in Mumbai report increased surveillance under AI-powered police systems, reversing *Transgender Persons Act* (2019) protections. These voices are absent from ‘national AI dialogue’ events, which exclude non-English speakers and rural populations.
India’s AI push is not a neutral technological leap but a *neocolonial extraction project*, repackaging 19th-century resource grabs as ‘digital sovereignty.
’ The resistance from rural communities—echoing *Chipko* and *Narmada* movements—reveals how state-corporate alliances (e.g., *Reliance Jio-Google*) treat land, labor, and data as disposable inputs for global capital. Historical parallels to *British plantation economies* and *colonial surveillance* (e.g., *Census Acts*) show this is not progress but *accumulation by dispossession 2.0*. Solutions require *Indigenous data governance*, *unionized AI labor*, and a *Global South AI alliance*—models already proven in *Rwanda*, *Brazil*, and *Māori* contexts—to dismantle the extractive framework and reclaim technology as a tool for *swaraj* (self-rule), not domination.