AI Must Mirror India Stack: Open, Accountable, and Built for All

As India leads the world in building ethical, privacy-first digital infrastructure, the next frontier is ensuring artificial intelligence evolves with the same transparency and inclusivity.

In October 2024, a group of 12-year-old school children accidentally revealed a profound truth about our modern relationship with technology. Their clever homework hack: 40% ChatGPT, 40% Google, and 20% of their own effort. While some may have dismissed it as digital-age cheating, it represents a growing mindset—one that values results over process, where asking the right question is more important than how the answer was found.

This mindset, born in classrooms, is now deeply embedded in how digital systems are built across the world. And in India, that evolution has taken a different and uniquely democratic path.

India Stack: A Global Model of Responsible Tech
 

India has quietly created one of the most comprehensive and inclusive digital public infrastructures in the world. Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, CoWIN, Bhashini, and ONDC—collectively known as India Stack—power millions of daily interactions across finance, identity, health, and language.

But what sets India Stack apart isn’t just its scale or efficiency. It’s the design principle that prioritizes privacy, minimal data retention, and public benefit. Unlike tech ecosystems in the West, which are dominated by private surveillance and data monetization, India’s digital systems operate on the idea of doing the job, and stepping away.

Take Aadhaar, for instance. It verifies identity but doesn’t track movements. DigiLocker fetches documents but doesn’t store them. UPI processes payments but doesn’t remember purchases. These systems are designed like switches—functional only when needed, and completely off when not.

This lean, ethical design has become a point of global admiration. India’s digital infrastructure doesn’t just serve—it respects.

The AI Moment: Built on Public Foundations
 

Now, a new layer of digital transformation is emerging: Artificial Intelligence. And just as India Stack created a revolution in service delivery, AI is poised to reshape how decisions are made, content is created, and services are scaled.

Here’s the concern: AI needs data to learn. And increasingly, that data is being drawn from public digital platforms.

• Language models are being trained using Bhashini.
• Health startups analyze trends using CoWIN data.
• Fintech companies refine models using UPI frameworks.

None of this is illegal. In fact, India’s open infrastructure was designed to enable innovation. But the ethical question looms large: Are the people who built and used these systems being left out of the value loop?

Just like the schoolchildren who let the machines do the hard work, AI developers are increasingly leveraging public systems without acknowledgment, contribution, or accountability. It raises a fundamental issue—not of privacy, but of fairness.

A Shift in the Debate: From Privacy to Fairness
 

In Europe, the conversation around AI centers on data protection and consent. Meta, for instance, has been told to stop using user data for AI training unless people opt in. Lawsuits, like that of The New York Times against OpenAI, highlight the cost of unpermitted usage.

In India, the digital foundation is already more privacy-compliant. But what we now need is transparency and reciprocity from companies building on top of it.

• If you’re training AI on public data, say so clearly.
• If public infrastructure fuels your innovation, contribute back—whether in the form of better data, research, or audits.
• If you benefit from systems the public helped build, share the impact and accountability.

This is not about blocking innovation. It’s about recognizing that openness must come with responsibility. AI must evolve like India Stack: for the public, by the public, and with the public in mind.

 

The Risk of Digital Exploitation
 

What makes India’s digital model exceptional is that it was never built to profit from personal information. Its strength lies in what it doesn’t keep. But that purity of purpose can be compromised if private players exploit open systems without ethical frameworks.

Without regulation, public trust can erode. Citizens may become wary of platforms that feel extractive. Worse, innovation may begin to serve profit over progress, detaching itself from the very communities it claims to help.

Building Guardrails for Ethical AI

If we want India’s digital journey to remain an example to the world, we need a simple pact:

• Recognize the public's role in building the ecosystem
• Require companies to disclose their use of public tools in AI
• Encourage open audits and model explainability
• Create policies that prioritize collective benefit over corporate secrecy

The children who used ChatGPT to finish their homework weren’t cheating the system. They were adapting to it. Likewise, as AI adapts to India’s digital framework, our policies must adapt too. Not by punishing usage, but by demanding fairness, clarity, and shared ownership.

Conclusion: Intelligence Needs Integrity

India didn’t just build a tech stack. It built trust. And that trust is now the foundation on which AI innovation is growing. But if the rewards of this next wave flow only to the few, while the risks remain public, then we’ve broken that trust.

AI must not just be powerful. It must be accountable.

We owe it to the millions who uploaded documents, verified identities, and sent payments—not to be left behind as silent contributors to a machine-driven future.

In the end, the intelligence of a society is measured not by how fast it adopts AI, but by how fairly it uses it.