India’s approach favours adaptive governance over legal overreach, leveraging existing laws such as the IT Act and Data Protection Act. A new AI Governance Group will coordinate national policy, ensuring AI drives inclusive growth and competitiveness. | Photo Credit: Dado Ruvic

The guidelines have been drafted by a high-level committee under the chairmanship of Prof. Balaraman Ravindran, IIT-Madras.

These are intended to guide policymakers, researchers, and industry to build better national and international cooperation for safe, responsible, and inclusive AI adoption. It seeks to ensure that India’s core commitment to inclusion translates into practical measures that prevent algorithmic bias and protect vulnerable groups from potential harm. This framework is designed to support evolving conceptions of safety and trust while promoting technological innovations through consistent dialogue between the government, domain experts, industry, and civil society.

The guidelines are based on seven principles: building trust, putting people first, focusing on promoting innovation rather than restraint, fairness and equity, accountability, and design that is transparent, safe, resilient, and sustainable.

Why is it important? What does it mean for the country?

The primary goal at this stage is to leverage AI for economic growth, inclusive development, resilience and global competitiveness. Given India’s talent advantage, the widespread adoption of AI across sectors can yield productivity gains, driving economic growth and creating jobs. Further, AI-based applications with multilingual and voice support are being deployed across agriculture, healthcare, education, disaster management, law, and finance, enabling digital inclusion and creating a real positive impact.

A balanced framework would help maximise these benefits, while retaining the regulatory agility and flexibility to intervene and mitigate risks as and when they emerge. Key sectors such as pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, manufacturing, media and social sectors hold significant potential for AI adoption, but to realise this potential requires a governance framework to enhance awareness, infrastructure, and investments. Initiatives like IndiaAI Mission are steps toward fostering AI adoption. Expanding domestic capacity while accelerating responsible adoption across sectors is critical to advancing India’s goals of inclusive growth and global competitiveness.

Is the government going to make a separate law/ regulation on AI with these guidelines?

No. The Committee’s current assessment is that many of the risks emerging from AI can be addressed through existing laws. For example, the use of deepfakes to impersonate individuals can be regulated by provisions under the Information Technology Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and the use of personal data without user consent to train AI models is governed by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

India is taking a techno-legal approach to embed legal requirements directly into system design. According to the government, it is both a design philosophy and a family of architectures that make regulatory principles automatically enforceable in practice. MeitY, as the nodal Ministry, is responsible for the overall adoption and regulation of AI systems. Its role is to promote innovation and adoption of AI technologies, while providing regulatory guidance in collaboration with bodies such as the AI Safety Institute (AISI) and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). A new body called the ‘AI Governance Group’ (AIGG) will be set up to coordinate policy on AI governance across all Ministries. It will be a small, permanent and effective inter-agency body responsible for overall policy development and coordination on AI governance in India. It should be supported by a Technology & Policy Expert Committee (TPEC), which will advise the group on strategy and implementation.

How is it different from the frameworks of countries like the US, the European Union, or South Korea?

India’s approach contrasts with that of the European Union, which has adopted a binding AI Act categorising systems by risk levels. The US, on the other hand, has left it to market forces to determine the rules.

India’s framework, by comparison, seeks a middle path, promoting AI as a driver of inclusion and competitiveness, while relying on adaptive governance rather than rigid regulation. This is one of the unique approaches which is built from the ground up, and this is not a version of what the EU has done or the US has done, the committee said, adding that it has looked at India and India’s needs, its ecosystem, and then built the frameworks completely ground up.

Published on November 6, 2025