AI's rise in India presents a significant choice: will we use it for broad-based prosperity or will we allow it to widen the existing gap? The path to inclusive growth isn't a given; it's a deliberate policy decision. By prioritizing augmentation over automation, fostering a competitive market, and empowering workers, AI can become a force for opportunity.
The Current Landscape
While headlines often focus on job displacement, the data tells a more nuanced story. A ServiceNow-Pearson 2025 analysis estimates that agentic AI could reshape around 10.35 million jobs in India by 2030, but it will also help create roughly 3 million new tech roles. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reinforces this, noting that most jobs are more likely to evolve as tasks change than disappear entirely—provided workers are equipped with new skills.
India's economic structure makes this a particularly important issue. The services sector, for example, contributes about 55% of the country's Gross Value Added (GVA), but employs only around 30% of the workforce. This concentration means that if AI boosts productivity in services faster than wages or employment, it could exacerbate inequality.
Three Pillars for Inclusive AI Policy
To guide the adoption of AI toward augmentation, India must focus on three key pillars:
1. Skilling for Mobility, Not Just Employability
Rather than one-time training, the goal should be lifelong learning. Large firms like Infosys are already leading the way, with company-wide programs that reskill hundreds of thousands of employees in AI. This proves that "whole-of-workforce" reskilling is not just an idea—it's feasible at scale. Training should be hyper-focused on task-level changes, such as teaching workers how to use generative AI tools for prompting and troubleshooting.
2. Making AI Markets Contestable
A market dominated by a few large firms can stifle innovation and push a one-size-fits-all, automation-first approach. To prevent this, India should hard-wire competition into its AI ecosystem. A report by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) highlights these risks, warning that without a proactive approach, platform-era monopolies could repeat themselves.
Concrete steps include:
- Neutral Access to Compute: Ensure that public or regulated wholesale access to powerful computing resources is available to startups, MSMEs, and universities at transparent and fair prices. The IndiaAI Mission is already expanding the country's national GPU capacity to over 34,000 GPUs, explicitly aiming to democratize access.
- Open Model Interfaces: Require open APIs and clear switching pathways in government tenders and procurement rules to prevent vendor lock-in and encourage a dynamic market.
3. Building Worker-Supportive Institutions
As AI changes the nature of work, the institutions that support workers must also evolve.
- Productivity-Sharing Incentives: Tie government benefits for AI investments to evidence that firms are sharing the gains with their employees through bonuses, wage increases, or other means.
- Portable Benefits: As task portfolios shift and workers move between employers more frequently, benefits and safety nets should be designed to follow them.
- Worker Voice: Encourage co-design committees where management and employees collaborate on the rollout of AI tools, linking compliance to access to public incentives.
A Blueprint from India’s Digital Public Infrastructure
India has a powerful model to follow in its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). Foundational systems like Aadhaar for identity and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for payments created open, interoperable building blocks that lowered entry barriers for countless innovators.
This same philosophy should be applied to AI by treating key components like compute and data as public goods. This includes funding sectoral data trusts with privacy built-in and supporting the development of small, vernacular AI models that can run on the edge.
By building open AI rails—open access to compute and data, interoperable APIs, and rules that keep markets competitive—India can incentivize employers to choose augmentation over automation. This choice, supported by a skilled workforce and strong institutions, is how AI can become a "saarthi" (charioteer) for broad-based prosperity, not a "vināshak" (destroyer).