When Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw publicly questioned the International Monetary Fund’s Artificial Intelligence Preparedness Index (AIPI), he was not merely disputing a number on a global leaderboard. He was challenging a worldview that still measures technological readiness through Western institutional lenses, often blind to the scale, speed, and democratic depth of India’s digital transformation. The IMF’s AIPI, which places India well outside the top tier of “AI-ready” nations, rests heavily on traditional metrics: per capita income, formal R&D spending, academic publications, and high-end computing infrastructure. These are safe, familiar, and deeply Western benchmarks. But they are also incomplete. They tell a story of privilege, not necessarily of potential or performance. India’s counter-claim — that it is “comfortably placed” in the global top three — may sound ambitious, even audacious. Yet ambition has been the defining currency of India’s digital rise. A decade ago, the idea that a country of 1.4 billion people could run the world’s largest biometric ID system, process billions of real-time digital payments every month, and build a nationwide digital public infrastructure stack would have been dismissed as fantasy. Today, Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker are case studies cited in policy schools across continents. What the IMF index struggles to capture is the “population-scale AI readiness” that India is quietly building. AI is not being confined to research labs or Silicon Valley-style unicorns. It is being embedded into governance: predictive crop advisories for farmers, AI-assisted diagnostics in rural health centers, facial recognition in railways, language translation tools for courts and classrooms, and automated welfare targeting systems. No other democracy is attempting to deploy AI across such a vast and socially diverse canvas. Critics will rightly point out the gaps. India still lags in high-end semiconductor manufacturing, frontier model development, and elite research output compared to the United States or China. Its AI startup ecosystem, while vibrant, does not yet dominate global markets. Data protection laws and ethical frameworks are still evolving. These are not trivial shortcomings. They are real, structural, and demand sustained policy attention.
But the deeper question is this: What does “AI preparedness” actually mean? Is it the ability to publish cutting-edge papers and train trillion-parameter models — or the ability to deploy intelligent systems at scale to solve real-world problems for real people? On that front, India is playing a different game altogether. Through initiatives like IndiaAI Mission, the push for domestic compute infrastructure, and the creation of sector-specific AI platforms in agriculture, healthcare, and education, the state is acting less like a passive regulator and more like an ecosystem architect. The goal is not merely to compete in the global AI arms race, but to democratize AI access within the country itself. Vaishnaw’s pushback also reflects a broader geopolitical undercurrent. Global institutions, born in a post-war Western order, are still grappling with how to measure the rise of non-Western technological models. China is judged by its state-driven industrial might. India, often, is judged by its per capita constraints. Neither framework fully captures a hybrid model that blends digital public goods, private innovation, and democratic governance at continental scale. There is, of course, a risk in chest-thumping. Rankings should not be dismissed simply because they are inconvenient. India’s claim to a top-three position will ultimately be tested not in press statements, but in patents filed, products exported, models trained, and global standards shaped. Yet Vaishnaw’s challenge serves a useful purpose. It forces a global conversation about whether AI readiness should be measured only by the power of machines — or by the reach of their impact. If the future of artificial intelligence is about shaping societies, not just markets, then India’s experiment may well deserve a higher place on the table than the spreadsheets currently allow.
