India can use its digital public infrastructure to build AI that protects rather than harms—if it has the will to transform principles into practice.
New Delhi [India], February 28: Since 2009, India has done the impossible by assigning a unique identity number to each of its residents, in a country that has hundreds of languages and millions of villages.
By 2023, Aadhaar had enrolled 1.37 billion people—approximately 94% of the population—making it the largest biometric database in human history. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now processes over 13 billion transactions monthly, more than all other real-time payment systems in the world combined. DigiLocker stores 6.5 billion documents. CoWIN managed 2.2 billion COVID-19 vaccination records.
India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has become a global model. More than 50 countries have studied India’s approach. The G20 endorsed DPI as a priority for global development. The World Bank has called it ‘a global public good.’ Countries from Singapore to Brazil to Kenya have adopted elements of India’s architecture.
India has already proven that it can build AI at scale, now the focus remains on using AI ethically.
The Seven Sutras: Principles Without Practice
In November 2025, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released India’s AI Governance Guidelines, built around seven principles it called the ‘Seven Sutras.’ These are substantial commitments, carefully articulated and thoughtfully designed:
- Trust as Foundation: AI systems must be trustworthy—transparent, explainable, and reliable.
- People First: Human wellbeing must be the primary objective of AI development.
- Innovation over Restraint: Regulation should enable innovation rather than stifle it.
- Fairness and Equity: AI must not discriminate or produce biased outcomes.
- Accountability: Clear lines of responsibility for AI decisions and outcomes.
- Understandable by Design: AI decisions must be explainable to affected individuals.
- Safety, Resilience, Sustainability: AI must be safe, robust, and environmentally responsible.
Though these principles are a step in the right direction, a lot needs to be done when it comes to putting these into practice.
“The gap between principle and practice is where people die. We have excellent principles. What we lack is architecture—the computational infrastructure that transforms principles into constraints that algorithms cannot violate.” a technology analyst working in the domain explained.
The Angelic Intelligence Framework
The Angelic Intelligence framework offers a specific methodology for translating the Seven Sutras from aspirations into implementations. Each sutra maps to specific agents with defined responsibilities:
The ‘People First’ sutra finds expression through Karuna (compassion), Maitri (friendship), and Raksha (protection)—agents specifically tasked with ensuring human wellbeing takes precedence over efficiency metrics. Karuna would have asked about Santoshi’s situation before denying her ration card. Raksha would have prevented Adil from receiving delivery assignments that endangered his life.
The ‘Fairness and Equity’ sutra finds expression through Nyaya (justice) and Sama (equanimity)—agents specifically designed to detect and prevent discrimination. Nyaya would have flagged the facial recognition system’s racial bias before it imprisoned innocent Muslims. Sama would have identified caste bias in training data before it was deployed.
The ‘Accountability’ sutra finds expression through multi-agent architecture itself, where every decision involves multiple perspectives with immutable audit trails. When an algorithm recommends denying benefits, Karuna’s objection and Satya’s verification are permanently recorded. Accountability is not an afterthought but an architectural requirement.
The ‘Safety’ sutra finds expression through Raksha (protection) and Sahana (patience)—agents whose purpose is to prevent harm before it occurs. Sahana would have prevented the 10-minute delivery promise that killed Adil. Raksha would have identified collection practices that were driving borrowers to suicide.
The IndiaAI Mission: Building Blocks for Transformation
In March 2024, the Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission with a budget of ₹10,372 crore (approximately $1.25 billion) over five years. The mission encompasses seven pillars that, taken together, could provide the infrastructure for ethical AI at national scale:
Pillar 1 — AI Compute Capacity: Building 10,000+ GPU clusters accessible to Indian researchers and startups. This compute capacity could run the multi-agent systems that ethical AI requires. Running 27 Angels in parallel for every decision requires substantial computing power—the IndiaAI Mission could provide it.
Pillar 2 — AI Innovation Centre: Developing indigenous AI models optimized for Indian languages and contexts. These models could be designed from inception with virtue-based architectures, encoding ethical reasoning into their foundational layers rather than adding constraints afterward.
Pillar 3 — AI Datasets Platform: Creating a unified repository of high-quality data reflecting India’s diversity. This dataset could be curated specifically to avoid encoding the discriminatory patterns—caste bias, religious prejudice, gender discrimination—that have infected existing systems. Training data determines model behaviour; ethical training data produces ethical models.
Pillar 4 — AI Application Development: Building AI applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, and governance. These are precisely the domains where ethical AI is most critical—where algorithmic decisions affect whether patients receive treatment, farmers get credit, students access education, and citizens receive benefits.
Pillar 5 — AI FutureSkills: Training 1 million Indians in AI by 2028. This workforce could be trained not just in technical skills but in ethical reasoning—understanding how to build systems that embody virtue, how to detect discriminatory patterns, how to design for human flourishing.
Pillar 6 — AI Startup Financing: Providing grants, loans, and equity for AI ventures. This financing could prioritize startups building ethical AI, creating economic incentives for virtue-based development rather than extraction-focused optimization.
Pillar 7 — Safe and Trusted AI: Establishing governance frameworks, testing protocols, and certification standards. This pillar could certify AI systems against Angelic Intelligence standards—verifying that systems embody the virtues they claim, that multi-agent deliberation actually occurs, that ethical constraints cannot be bypassed.
Though these goals are a step in the right direction, this cannot be done without Angelic Intelligence.
“The IndiaAI Mission is building the hardware. Angelic Intelligence provides the software—the ethical operating system that transforms computational power into human flourishing.” Shekhar Natarajan, the founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI, explains.
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