Major opportunities for AI in jobs and governance, says MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan

India's AI opportunities in jobs and governance, focusing on infrastructure, reskilling, and international cooperation ahead of the AI Impact Summit.

Ahead of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, the Secretary for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in a wide-ranging conversation at The Hindu MIND event moderated by Aroon Deep discussed artificial intelligence (AI), India’s semiconductor ambitions, and MeitY’s role in digital governance.

Excerpts from the interview:

We are less than a week away from the India AI Impact Summit, which will witness participation of representatives from dozens of countries. Could you give us a quick rundown on where we are on AI from an Indian perspective?

We’ve taken an approach where we will try to provide the three aspects of infrastructure that AI needs: compute, datasets, and models. With government support, access to these is made a little easier. Then the focus is on seeing what we can do with the applications and solutions that people are able to develop using these resources.

Ultimately, there are two things that are important. One, that firms’ revenues will depend on how they deploy AI. Deployment is important and that’s what also delivers impact. In the Indian context, there are many areas where you can use AI to enhance productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. Our start-ups can do well and these are things that we can offer also as products to the rest of the world.

We necessarily have to do it a little frugally given the kind of resources we have, which is again a reason why this model that we have adopted appeals to many countries in the poorer parts [of the world]. In a number of indicators relating to AI, which institutions like Stanford University and others measure, we seem to be doing relatively well. On the Vibrancy Index, we ranked third, on skill penetration and use of AI for enterprise solutions, we ranked second overall.