The UN’s 2026 Global Risk Report says the planet is least prepared for artificial intelligence and for the concentration of technological power in a few hands. India has spent a decade building the antidote — and the numbers now prove it works.
By Binod Anand Secretary General, Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI)
Every two years the United Nations asks around 1,300 experts across governments, business, civil society and its own system to map the dangers facing humanity. The 2026 edition, just released, studied twenty-eight global risks across five families — political, economic, environmental, societal and technological — and its sharpest warning is aimed straight at the digital age.
The World Fears the Age of AI. India Has Been Quietly Building the Answer
Of all twenty-eight risks, the ones the world feels least equipped to handle are technological. When respondents ranked how prepared our multilateral institutions are, technology-driven power concentration came 22nd out of 28, artificial intelligence and frontier technologies 24th, cybersecurity breakdown 26th, and geoengineering disasters 27th. In other words, four of the five worst-prepared risks on the entire planet are about technology. Respondents named “inadequate data and information” — the absence of a shared, open understanding — as a barrier more than 900 times.
That is a diagnosis. It is not yet a solution. And here is where I want to turn the usual conversation on its head. For once, the answer the world is searching for is not being written in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. A great deal of it is being written in India — and it is being written at a scale, and with a philosophy, that the world has not yet fully understood.
The world’s problem, named precisely
Read the report carefully and the technology danger has two faces. The first is the technology itself — AI moving faster than anyone’s ability to govern it. The second, and deeper, is who controls it. When a handful of firms own the models, the compute, the data and the rails on which modern life runs, every citizen, every small business, every farmer becomes a tenant on somebody else’s land.
Now read the same report from where I sit, in South Asia. In our own region, respondents put large-scale war and geopolitical tension at the very top of the risk list — a reminder that the digital and the geopolitical are now the same conversation. A nation that does not control its own digital foundations does not fully control its own security. Concentration of power, closed data, a governance vacuum — ask yourself what the opposite of all three would look like, and you have described India’s model of technology almost exactly.
The Indian way: technology as public infrastructure, not private property
India made an unusual bet more than a decade ago. Instead of leaving the digital foundations of the country to be built and owned by private monopolies, it built them as public infrastructure — open, interoperable, population-scale rails on which anyone could innovate.
The scale is no longer theoretical. In August 2026 alone, the Unified Payments Interface — UPI, the free public rail any bank or app can plug into — processed a record 24.5 billion transactions worth close to ₹29.8 lakh crore, averaging some 791 million transactions every single day. India now accounts for roughly 49 per cent of the world’s real-time digital payments — more than three times the share of the next-largest system anywhere on earth — and UPI carries about 85 per cent of the country’s retail digital payments. This is not a walled garden owned by one company. It is a commons. Its defining feature is precisely the one the UN report finds missing everywhere else: it deconcentrates power rather than hoarding it.
This is not a small technical detail. It is a philosophy of development. In the dominant global model, technology is a walled garden and the citizen is the product. In the Indian model — India Stack, built from a citizen-owned digital identity, the UPI payments layer, the DigiLocker document layer and a consent-based data-exchange architecture — technology is a public utility and the citizen is the owner. One model concentrates risk in a few nodes that, if captured or breached, take the whole system down. The other distributes both capability and resilience across more than a billion people. When the UN warns about technology-driven power concentration, India can reasonably reply: we saw that risk coming, and we designed against it.
India’s AI chapter: sovereign, but shared
The same logic now runs through India’s approach to artificial intelligence, and this is what the world should study most closely. Through the IndiaAI Mission — a roughly ₹10,372-crore, $1.25-billion national programme approved in 2024 — India is not trying to out-spend the giants. It is making a deliberate bet on access.
Public computing power — more than 34,000 high-end GPUs, scaling toward a target of 100,000 by the end of 2026 — is being offered to startups, researchers, universities and government at heavily subsidised rates, a fraction of what the same compute costs on foreign cloud platforms. A national datasets platform treats non-personal, anonymised public data as a shared resource that Indian innovators can build on rather than scrape or buy. Indigenous, open-weight foundation models are emerging on top of this stack. India’s public AI systems, including the engine that delivers services in the country’s own languages, are being run on sovereign, in-country infrastructure so that citizens’ data and interactions stay within India’s jurisdiction, anchored by a national data-protection law.
Look at what that combination achieves. It builds sovereign capability — the ability to train, run and govern AI on infrastructure a nation controls — without building a closed fortress. It answers the report’s warning about power concentration by making compute and data public goods rather than private moats. And it directly attacks the “inadequate data and information” barrier the report names, by supplying open data as infrastructure. This is not merely being prepared for the technology risk. It is a template for how to be prepared.
The proof is in the last mile
None of this would matter if it stopped at the metropolitan startup. Its real test — and India’s real distinction — is that this infrastructure reaches the village, and here the numbers are extraordinary.
Welfare now travels directly into the bank accounts of the poor without leaking through middlemen; government data credits Direct Benefit Transfer with plugging leakages worth lakhs of crores of rupees. PM-KISAN, one of the largest such schemes on earth, has put income support directly into the hands of roughly 11.8 crore farmer families. And agriculture is now getting its own public rail: under the Digital Agriculture Mission, a ₹2,817-crore programme, more than 10.3 crore farmers had received a unique digital Farmer ID by August 2026, linking them to credit, crop insurance, procurement and advisory services — with over 2,000 agri-tech startups already building on the open registry. An AI that can speak to a farmer in her own mother tongue is not a novelty here; it is public policy.
This is the point I want my rural readers to hold onto. The Indian model of technology does not treat inclusion as charity added at the end. It treats inclusion as the design principle at the beginning. Technology that includes the last person is, by definition, technology that concentrates power in no one. Resilience and equity turn out to be the same engineering choice.
What the globe should learn
The UN report’s most repeated finding is that no single actor can manage these risks alone. Across all twenty-eight risks, respondents named joint action between governments as by far the most effective response — cited nearly 3,000 times, dwarfing every go-it-alone alternative. And the single biggest barrier they identified, mentioned more than 2,200 times, was weak governance and coordination, followed by a lack of political consensus.
India has already turned its model into exactly that kind of cooperation. Through India Stack Global and a public repository of digital solutions born of its G20 leadership, India has signed digital-infrastructure partnerships with around two dozen countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Its payments rails are live in more than eight nations; its open-source identity platform now runs in over fifteen developing countries. This is not technological charity, and it is not conquest. It is South-South cooperation — the sharing of open rails and safeguards so that other nations can build their own sovereign, inclusive systems rather than rent someone else’s.
So the lessons the world should draw are three, and they are simple.
First, build technology as a public good — as rails, not walled gardens — so that power is distributed by design and no single failure or capture can bring the system down.
Second, pursue sovereignty through openness, not autarky. India’s answer to dependence was not to close its doors but to build shared, open infrastructure it controls and can offer to others.
Third, make inclusion the first design choice, not the last. The measure of a technology is whether it reaches the farmer, the widow, the migrant — because that is also the measure of whether its benefits are concentrated or shared.
There is an older Indian word for all of this: sahkar — cooperation. Digital Public Infrastructure is nothing but the cooperative principle written in code: shared infrastructure, distributed benefit, collective resilience. It is the same idea that has held Indian villages together for generations, now operating at the scale of a billion people and, increasingly, of the world.
The 2026 Global Risk Report warns that funding to actually reduce risk is drying up — 86 per cent of respondents call it inadequate — and it ends, as every such report ends, by asking who will act while there is still time. India did not wait to be asked. It has spent a decade building a way of developing technology that is prepared for risk because it refuses to concentrate it. The world is looking for that answer. It has been here all along.
The author is Secretary General of the Confederation of NGOs of Rural India (CNRI) and founder of the World Cooperative Economic Forum. Views are personal.
