From Vision to Real-World Impact: India at the Global Tech Helm
The name “Sambhavna,” which means “possibility” or “opportunity,” does not instantly generate images of a worldwide conference that unites the frequently separate areas of technology and geopolitics. Good friends who are geopolitically oriented and largely from the divided “West” have called this year’s Global Technology Summit (GTS) theme “strange,” “out of sync,” and “unreal.” In the ever-evolving realm of technology, “possibilities” are crucial.
For those of us at Carnegie India, preoccupied with an outcome-oriented GTS, our sense was that despite the turbulence in global orders and international orientations alike, there is space for Sambhavna. The theocracy of older orders has met with a sledgehammer. Europe’s welfare future is in potential disarray. Trade and tariff wars are the common theme in national and local politics across the world. Get real. Get practical. And embrace realism—that is the tone of the day.
Still, there is a verve in India and beyond—across other parts of Asia, within Latin America, and in large parts of Africa—to seize opportunities for change and shake off older shibboleths that have slowed economic and technological progress. One cannot move without the other.
The point is to discover these opportunities and use the force of global change to initiate long-pending reforms for domestic growth. Build bridges where none exist and find pathways in less-travelled roads. After all, as those in power often remind us, disruptions open the way for alternative opportunities. In many ways, making the best of these opportunities comes down to the tasks of diplomatic skill, assessing trade-offs with a clear-eyed view of our future, and, most importantly, operationally channeling imagination and creativity.
This is the spirit with which we at Carnegie India have approached this year’s GTS. Rather than focusing only on the risks of AI, we focus on its promise. Instead of only debating how and why the “rules of the road” have changed, we focus on how innovations allow for new, scalable approaches to unleash global digital transformation. While debates on space are caught between different stars linking our universe, we look at building technologies for cooperation and how they need to be written into different codes of practice in Geneva, Vienna, and other norm-making jurisdictions.
While climate change enthusiasts remain struck by the exit of the United States, we concentrate on how digital public infrastructure (DPI) for climate change could rescue the Conference of the Parties. As innovative bilateral and plurilateral arrangements in diplomacy shape India’s technology-first advances, we remain fixated on how these mechanisms and their reformations can succeed with the United States—India’s most consequential strategic partner.
We also focus on partnerships with Europe, within the Quad, in emerging economies, and through a range of new alignments with Australia and the United Kingdom. In each of these vectors, we aim to move the policy needle, build bridges, and even get Americans and Europeans to sit together to discuss the future of technology, albeit behind closed doors.
From geopolitics to grassroots
At an instinctive level, the GTS also serves a mission to sensitize different nationalities, governments, and markets to the variety of ways in which geopolitics shapes technological change between the global and the local. These effects can make or break futures, at least for a specific period of time, and inform the reorientation of national priorities, jettison sovereign alternatives, and potentially break the market.
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