AI governance in India – law, policy and political economy

Artificial Intelligence technologies have elicited a range of policy responses in India, particularly as the Government of India attempts to position and project the country as a global leader in the production of AI technologies. Policy responses have ranged from providing public infrastructure to enable market-led AI production, to nationalising datasets in an effort to enable Big Data analysis through AI. This paper examines the recent history of AI policy in India from a critical political economy perspective, and argues that AI policy and governance in India constructs and legitimises a globally-dominant paradigm of informational capitalism, based on the construction of data as a productive resource for an information-based economic production, and encouraging self-regulation of harmful impacts by firms, even as it attempts to secure a strong hand for the state to determine, both through law and infrastructure, how such a market is structured and to what ends.