Kamal Malhotra
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Global Development Policy Centre, Boston University, USA; Distinguished Visiting Professor, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India
Boston Global Forum Conference on the Boston Finance Accord for AI Governance 24/7
Loeb House, Harvard University, April 22, 2025
Governor Michael Dukakis, Co-Founder and Co-Chair, Boston Global Forum (BGF),
Professor Thomas Patterson, Co-Founder, BGF
Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founder, CEO and Co-Chair, BGF
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you for this invitation to speak. It is an honour for me to be back at Harvard and to speak at this historic venue, Loeb House. I have a longer paper but given the time constraints, I am making an abbreviated presentation.
While India ranks in the global top five on Stanford University’s AI Vibrancy Index experts agree that India is many years behind the two global leaders, China and the USA.
The Government announced its India AI Mission in March 2024 with an outlay about USD 1.2 billion. USD 232 million or nearly 25% of the entire India AI Mission budget has been approved for spending as part of the most recent Union Budget 2025-26.
Government 24/7 in India
The AI India Mission is an early step in India’s AI journey. While some early steps have been taken, AI 24/7 Government is still aspirational in India.
Some key prerequisites for AI powered Government 24/7 nevertheless exist in India and give cause for hope both for the country itself and for its potential Global South leadership in this area. These prerequisites include India’s world class and now well established and recognized Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), prominent among which are the UPI, a real-time payment system, and the Aadhaar, a national biometric identity system. DPI is an open, interoperable digital system for identity, payments, and data which inherently promotes transparency and inclusivity. By placing essential services on digital platforms, these are made accessible to all. As a result, DPI enables service delivery in a “transparent and accountable manner”.
Moreover, in an aggregate sense, the scale in India is huge, by any global standard. India’s Aadhar covers 1.3 billion people. India has also used DPI in several areas. Its UPI payment system is an acknowledged global leader in ease of use, transaction value (approximately USD 239 billion, in August 2024, a 31% increase over the previous year) and volume (14.96 billion in August 2024, a 41% year-on-year increase). The average daily transaction volume was 483 million and average daily transaction value was USD 7.7 billion.
This Boston Global Forum Conference has prioritized, among others, transparency and accountability, scalability, inclusivity and financial innovation, including the use of real time financial systems for AI Government 24/7. Allow me to highlight the current state of play in India in these critical areas
- Transparency and Accountability
24/7 government has markedly improved transparency and accountability in some areas. Good Indian examples include Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs), real-time dashboards, and faceless services that minimize corruption and increase traceability. In India, services like Aadhaar, UPI, and DigiLocker also provide audit trails that ensure accountability.
- Dis-intermediated technology for AI Government 24/7
Dis-intermediated technology helps increase fairness, trust, efficiency and equity, in addition to reducing rent-seeking behaviour, leakages and corruption by eliminating middlemen. It does this by offering direct, online, faceless, 24/7 government services to the public. Prominent, tested examples in India include DBT, tax filings, passport services and online transport services in Delhi.
By digitizing payments, India is estimated to have saved over USD 27 billion in several schemes due to the removal of duplicate or fake beneficiaries and bribery opportunities
- Skilling and Re-skilling
Key skilling areas include digital literacy for citizens, re-skilling government employees for e-governance and AI, cloud and cybersecurity training.
Significant skilling and capacity gaps continue to exist. A particular high-risk area in India for both government and citizens is from cyber-attackers because of the inadequacy of effective cybersecurity which becomes more and more crucial as services leverage authenticated identity.
- Scaling DPI with AI
AI can enhance and scale-up DPI with tools like chatbots, personalized services, automated back-end workflows and predictive analytics. Such integration makes AI Government 24/7 proactive, inclusive and accessible round the clock. India has several examples, notable among which was CoWIN which made vaccinations easy to track nationally during COVID-19.
Driving the AI 24/7 Governance Agenda: Key Institutions
Successfully achieving uniform digital platforms across the country requires a strong but genuinely democratic and accountable central government, and often, in countries like India and many others in the Global South, the leadership of the Prime Minister’s Office. A dedicated task force for AI 24/7 services should be created to coordinate inter-ministerial and centre-state implementation. Judicial and legislative support will also be necessary for policy and legal frameworks.
- Effective Data Utilization
India’s corporate private sector, especially banking and other services sectors, are using AI effectively to study and use large data pools (credit scores, human resources applications). A lot more needs to be done by government, however. Data on cybercrime and cyber breaches need to be addressed as a matter of priority.
- Urban and Rural Infrastructure Readiness and Financing
This is a critical area for all countries, especially in the Global South. India’s aggressive investment in rural connectivity— 95% villages covered— and it having amongst the cheapest mobile data rates globally stand out.
Public-private Partnership (PPP) financing will need to include government funding to ensure universal access, and private investment to innovate and maintain advanced services.
Some Overall Challenges for AI Government 24/7 in India
Effective AI Government 24/7 and governance requires a level of standardization. This is a unique challenge in a country like India given its diversity, breadth and complex centre-state relations.
The equity, inclusiveness and citizen empowerment aspects of AI Government 24/7 in the genuine public interest need enhancement and a much bigger, strategic push beyond tax filing and passports. Education and health pose a specific challenge because of centre-state relation complexities.
User interface remains a major problem affecting migrant populations (estimated at over a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion population). While digitization and AI can help, they cannot fill in for missing services or investment.
A cautionary note is also in order from a good governance and human rights perspective. AI Government 24/7 can be a double-edged sword since it gives the central government enormous power, control and oversight over citizen data and activities.
India’s Potential Niche in the Global South
Despite some limitations, most experts will, no doubt, agree that India has demonstrated adequate scale, credibility and potential in the digital area for it to play a leadership role on AI Government 24/7 in the Global South. This was a main reason for why Indian Prime Minister Modi was asked to Co-Chair the recent February 2025 Paris AI Action Summit (AIAS) with President Macron.
India also showcased its DPI during the country’s 2023 G20 Presidency where it secured support for a “One Future Alliance”, a proposed mechanism for G20 members and institutions to pool funds to sponsor DPI deployments in developing countries of the Global South.
India has advocated for “digital sovereignty” and “tech neutrality” at the United Nations and has expressed serious concern about its strategic autonomy being violated by dependence on foreign services and platforms that could be subject to sovereign action e.g. US sanctions that cut off payment services (SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, Amex) to Russia after its illegal invasion of Ukraine. As a result of these concerns, India has advocated for a federated, open-source model in global forums. These include its Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP).
Open standards, data localization, national clouds, and initiatives like India’s MOSIP offer countries modular and open-source technology to build and own their national identity systems to maintain their autonomy. Universal coverage, accessibility and inclusion are key principles. To-date, 26 countries across the Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have registered on it.
Strategic autonomy in this area is obviously a special concern for an AI digitally powered 24/7 government, making sovereign control of digital platforms and data a high priority for governments. A major legitimate concern many Global South countries have is that India could switch them off just like what happened with the US on SWIFT for Russia. ‘Sovereign clouds’ are one suggested solution by Big Tech.
Financing AI Government 24/7 in the Global South
Financing can come from national budgets, multilateral agencies, PPPs and philanthropy. India’s role could include sharing expertise through its India Stack diplomacy, providing grants and other forms of aid and advocating global funds for DPI. India’s partnerships with Nepal, Bhutan, Singapore, and numerous countries in Africa show the value of a growing digital soft power strategy.
South-South Cooperation bonds, PPPs for telecon infrastructure, big tech digital inclusion (e.g. Microsoft’s Africa’s broadband) and crowdfunding are all needed to structure partnerships to guarantee public affordability and open access.
The bigger finance question for AI Government 24/7 is the same as the finance question for e-governance. All governments need to budget for technology, digitalization and cybersecurity. Multilateral and development agencies can play a role in financing these for Global South countries struggling to do so themselves, especially to influence quicker adoption, in the same manner that the UN and multilateral development banks (MDBs) are supporting or financing renewable energy (RE) and green power projects in many developing countries.
