⚡ Quick Summary & Key Takeaways
- India is bypassing Western models by utilizing its "Jugaad" design philosophy—frugal, high-impact innovation scaled for diverse linguistic and digital needs.
- True competitive advantage in the AI era isn't found in compute budgets, but in "out-intending" machines through human consciousness and examined purpose.
- Leaders must stop measuring success by western-centric maps and start prioritizing precise, intentional deployment that respects the limits of external dependencies.
India Did Not Ask For Permission. Here Is What It Built.
Part of the AI in Government series. Read the previous piece: The Sovereign AI Paradox.
Yesterday, this series made one argument plainly. The sovereign AI [the practice of a nation owning and governing its own artificial intelligence on home ground — the processing power, the trained models, and the rules that bind them] paradox is that the harder you chase total independence, the more exposed you become. Real control comes from managing your dependence with absolute discipline. Not pretending it does not exist.
India did not need to read that argument. It has been living it for decades.
THE SCENE NOBODY FROM SILICON VALLEY VISITS
Picture a farm holding before the sun reaches full height. The air is still cool, carrying the smell of dry soil and the last of the night’s damp. A farmer opens a phone — one of 140 million small farm holdings across the country — and checks a weather prediction generated not by a server in California, but by a sensor metres from where he stands, trained on the micro-conditions of this specific field.
That is not a pilot project. That is India in 2025.
I sat down with Tushar Kansal — a venture capitalist who steers a network of more than 1,700 international investors, affiliated with a lead anchor investor managing 2.7 billion dollars across 130-plus IPOs. He has spent a decade at the precise intersection of capital, technology, and human ambition. He does not trade in comfortable narratives.
His opening point was a correction most Western commentators need to hear.
THE NUMBERS THE WEST IS NOT READING
India is already the second-largest user base for the world’s leading AI tools. One in every eight weekly active users globally sits in India. According to the Stanford AI Index 2026, 80 per cent of Indian professionals use AI tools at work on a regular basis — against roughly 50 per cent in the United States. On professional networks, AI skill penetration among Indian profiles runs at three times the global average, ahead of America and Germany.
The conversation about AI risk is loud, well-funded, and happening in a handful of familiar capitals. The conversation about AI use — daily, practical, at population scale — is happening somewhere else entirely.
Tushar put it plainly. “The world is having a conversation about AI without India in the room.” That is not a grievance. It is a statement of fact that contains a warning for every leader who still equates innovation with postcode.
WHAT JUGAAD ACTUALLY MEANS
India did not build its AI approach by copying the Western model and spending less. It built a fundamentally different model — rooted in a national design philosophy the country has carried for generations.
Jugaad. The art of frugal innovation. Making it work when the resources you want are simply not available. Not a workaround. A method.
Tushar described what this looks like in practice. The India AI Mission is funding Sarvam AI — a home-grown language model built not for English, but for the more than 700 languages and dialects spoken across India. It is being embedded directly into the India Stack — the national biometric identity and real-time payments network that already makes India the global leader in digital transactions.
Startups like Fuzzle are deploying predictive intelligence for micro-weather forecasting across millions of farm holdings. Healthcare companies like Niramai are using thermal imaging for non-invasive cancer screening at a fraction of the Western equivalent cost. The country is not importing someone else’s answer to its own questions. It is building the question and the answer together, in its own languages, at its own scale.
THE DELHI SUMMIT AND THE DIPLOMATIC SHIFT
In February 2025, something happened at the Delhi AI Summit that most Western commentary has not adequately absorbed.
India set the table and both superpowers sat down. For the first time, the United States and China signed a unified declaration — shifting the global conversation from theoretical risk management to practical governance and measurable human impact. Investment commitments that followed exceeded 200 billion dollars.
The slogan was “People, Planet, Progress.” According to Tushar, it meant something precise. A nation that once borrowed its digital foundations forced the two dominant technology powers to agree in the same room. That shift did not come from raw spending. It came from a country that had been thinking seriously about the real problem — deployment at human scale — while everyone else was arguing about safety frameworks and compute rankings.
THE PARADOX INSIDE THE PARADOX
Yesterday’s piece established the uncomfortable truth at the heart of every national AI programme. You can own the hall, the flag, and the budget, and still not own the thing that matters.
The processors running India’s national ambition carry American corporate names. The data generated by hundreds of millions of Indian users flows, as Tushar noted, “to foreign shores.” The pricing exposure sits just as openly. “They might decide one day that they want to double the price of it,” he said, “or maybe triple the price of it.”
India knows this. India is building around it. Not by chasing impossible isolation, but by doing what Jugaad always demanded — finding the most precise, intelligent method when raw power is not available. “If we do not have the compute power,” Tushar told me, “we better have the smartest method.” That is not a consolation prize dressed as strategy. It is the real strategy — the one a nation arriving from constraint has always understood better than one arriving from abundance.
SELF-ENGINEERING AND THE QUESTION THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
The deepest part of my conversation with Tushar had nothing to do with summits, statistics, or national programmes.
He spoke about what he calls Self-Engineering — his conviction that the human being inside the founder matters more than the technology the founder deploys. In a world where every founder on earth holds access to the same tools, the differentiator is not the tool. It is the consciousness behind the hand that holds it.
He drew on something older than any technology company. Invoking the Indian mystic Osho, Tushar drew a line between two fundamentally different orientations. A hammer is useful. A machine is useful. Asking how to remain useful is the language of something built to serve. Humans are not built to serve. Humans are built to create, and creativity comes from consciousness.
“AI can give you the right answer,” he said. “But it cannot give you the right intention.”
I heard that line at the close of yesterday’s piece. It lands differently inside India’s philosophical tradition. The West tends to arrive at this conclusion reluctantly, as a concession. India has been building from it as a foundation.
WHAT ANCIENT WISDOM UNDERSTANDS THAT SILICON VALLEY HAS MISSED
I asked Tushar what Indic philosophy understands about living alongside intelligent machines that the dominant technology conversation has missed completely. The answer was orientation.
Silicon Valley frames the human question as: what can you do that the machine cannot yet do? That is a question of function. The Indian philosophical tradition asks something prior: what are you here for? That is a question of purpose.
The first question produces anxiety. The second produces clarity.
In a world where every technical function will eventually be reachable by a machine, the leaders who win will not be the ones who out-perform the tool. They will be the ones who out-intend it. Who bring to every decision, every relationship, every creative act, the quality of attention that comes from a life that has been genuinely examined.
That is not optimism. That is the oldest competitive advantage available to a human being.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR LEADERSHIP THIS WEEK
The leaders who win this decade will not be the ones with the largest compute budget. They will be the ones who deploy with the clearest purpose — and protect what cannot be automated.
Three things worth putting in place:
- Read the scale correctly. If your strategy does not account for India’s adoption pace and depth, you are modelling the future around the wrong map. The next wave of influence, talent, and creative output is not coming from where you expect.
- Apply the Jugaad test. Before you approve the expensive build, ask whether a smarter, lighter method achieves the same result. Constraint is not the enemy of quality. It is often the origin of precision.
- Protect your intention. Every tool you adopt creates a relationship with the company that built it. Manage that exposure with discipline. What you build on top of it — the trust, the creativity, the human judgment — remains yours entirely.
THE CLOSE
India is not asking Silicon Valley for permission to lead. It never was.
Yesterday this series argued that real control comes from managing dependence with discipline, not pretending it does not exist. India is the living proof. It knows the exposure. It is building precisely and intentionally around it — in its own languages, at its own scale, rooted in its own philosophical tradition.
The distance between where you stand today and leading with genuine purpose in this new order is shorter than it looks. The leaders who win are not the ones who had the most resources. They are the ones who built something brilliant from the ones they had.
1.4 billion people have been practising that for a very long time. The rest of the world is catching up.
The full conversation with Tushar Kansal is available now on Influential Visions. For world-class expert thinking delivered every Monday — Monday Influencer®.
💡 Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 'Jugaad' philosophy in the context of India's AI?
Jugaad refers to the art of frugal innovation—finding precise, intelligent methods to solve complex problems when resources are scarce. In India's AI mission, it means building solutions tailored for local languages and populations rather than importing Western-centric models.
How does India's AI adoption compare to the West?
India is the second-largest user base for global AI tools, with 80% of professionals using them regularly compared to roughly 50% in the United States. AI skill penetration in India is three times the global average.
What is the 'Sovereign AI' paradox discussed in the text?
The paradox is that the more a nation chases total independence from global tech, the more exposed it becomes. True control requires acknowledging and managing those dependencies with absolute discipline rather than pretending they don't exist.