From being the world’s back office to becoming a front-runner in the global economy, India’s technology story has been shaped by scale. Now, as one of the fastest adopters of artificial intelligence, the country has earned its place at the global tech table.

But the journey doesn’t end there. In fact, it is just the beginning. According to the Bharat AI Startups Report 2026, published by Inc42 in collaboration with Google, India’s competitive edge in AI is unlikely to come from frontier research alone, but from execution. Building, integrating and scaling AI in real-world use cases is where Indian innovation is expected to stand out.

The early signals are already visible. Since 2020, Indian AI startups have raised over $18 Bn, with nearly 86% of this capital flowing into application-layer companies. This backdrop sets the tone for the India AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled in New Delhi from February 16 to 20.

The summit comes at a moment when India has positioned itself differently from popular global conversations. Moving beyond safety and regulation, the focus is on how AI can operate at scale across languages, income levels, and access levels.

At the core of this effort is the IndiaAI Mission. In an exclusive, wide-ranging conversation with Inc42, Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at MeitY and CEO of the IndiaAI Mission, described the vision of India’s AI policy. Singh explained how democratisation sits at the heart of India’s AI strategy, how real-world use cases in healthcare and governance are moving beyond pilots, and why India sees voice-led AI as its biggest global opportunity.

Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:

Inc42: India has demonstrated population-scale digital innovation through platforms like Aadhaar and UPI. With IndiaAI, what kind of AI capability are we aiming to build?

Abhishek Singh: The vision is quite simple. In the last decade, with UPI and Aadhaar, we built the digital highway. Now, with IndiaAI, we are building the cars that run on it.

We want India to move from being an AI consumer to an AI creator. To do that, we are building core capabilities in three specific areas. First is compute. You can’t build AI without the hardware, so we are procuring over 10,000 GPUs to give our startups the raw power they need. Second is data. We are building AI Kosh – a massive repository of Indian datasets so that models can understand our context. And third is foundation models. We want models that speak our languages and understand our diversity.

Inc42: When you engage with global governments and institutions, what aspects of India’s AI approach tend to stand out or spark interest?

Abhishek Singh: It is our focus on democratisation. When I talk to global leaders, they are focussed on the risks or the commercial profits of AI. But they look at India and see something different: they see AI being used for social impact at scale.

They want to know how we plan to use AI to help a farmer in a........

© Inc42