The Third Way: How India’s AI Governance Could Become the Global South’s Template
![muted documentary photography, diplomatic setting, formal atmosphere, institutional gravitas, desaturated color palette, press photography style, 35mm film grain, natural lighting, professional photojournalism, a weathered ledger bound in oxidized copper, its spine cracked with age and threaded with strands of glowing fiber-optic filament, resting on a sandstone plinth under slanted side lighting from tall colonial windows, the atmosphere still and hushed like an archive at dawn, dust suspended in the air, the cover embossed with a seal merging an Ashoka Chakra and a neural circuit [Bria Fibo]](https://081x4rbriqin1aej.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/viral-images/a9b3b979-2820-4e82-a930-4823c54e0399_viral_0_square.png "muted documentary photography, diplomatic setting, formal atmosphere, institutional gravitas, desaturated color palette, press photography style, 35mm film grain, natural lighting, professional photojournalism, a weathered ledger bound in oxidized copper, its spine cracked with age and threaded with strands of glowing fiber-optic filament, resting on a sandstone plinth under slanted side lighting from tall colonial windows, the atmosphere still and hushed like an archive at dawn, dust suspended in the air, the cover embossed with a seal merging an Ashoka Chakra and a neural circuit [Bria Fibo]")
The most enduring regulatory frameworks are not invented in moments of disruption, but evolved from the structures already in place—India’s AI guidelines, like its land reforms before them, extend rather than replace, testing adaptation through consultation rather than declaration.
When new technologies disrupt old orders, the most enduring solutions rarely come from the powers that invented them—but from those who must adapt them to survive. In 1901, when electricity began transforming industry, it wasn’t General Electric or Siemens that redefined its governance, but countries like Denmark and Sweden, which built cooperative energy grids suited to their decentralized populations—models later emulated worldwide. A century later, India stands at a similar inflection point with artificial intelligence. Instead of drafting a sweeping AI law like the EU, or trusting market forces like the U.S., India is doing something quietly revolutionary: it is retrofitting colonial-era legal codes and early 21st-century digital regulations to manage deepfakes, synthetic content, and algorithmic harm. The November 2025 AI Governance Guidelines didn’t announce a new regime—they declared a philosophy: *use what works, fix what doesn’t, and consult as you go*. This echoes how post-independence India repurposed British administrative systems to deliver land reforms and food security. Now, in 2026, as New Delhi hosts the AI Impact Summit, the world is witnessing the birth of a new regulatory archetype—one not born of Silicon Valley disruption or Beijing-style control, but of Delhi’s deliberative pragmatism. And if history is any guide, it may be this middle path, forged in complexity and constraint, that proves most exportable to the rest of the world.
—Sir Edward Pemberton
Published February 16, 2026