Govt committee lays down guidelines for AI governance in India

Committee lays down practical guidelines for industry and regulators

- Sejal Sharma

NEW DELHI: The government-appointed committee behind the India AI Governance Guidelines has laid down a set of practical guidelines for industry and regulators, along with a detailed accountability framework, grievance redressal mechanisms, and an action plan for how India should implement AI governance over the coming years.

“This [report] makes the roll-out of AI in a very dynamic, safe and innovative way. We need to see how we take it forward especially when they say that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just two years away,” said Principal Scientific Adviser Ajay Kumar Sood. “We should be seeing how really we prepare ourselves for AGI...I don’t think it can be linearly scaled the way it is happening... to keep on pumping more GPUs. The oceans will boil before we do that. That cannot be the answer.”

The recommendations of the committee, currently not enforceable in law, urges companies developing and deploying AI systems compliance with existing laws and voluntary principles on privacy and transparency. It recommends that firms update their service terms to reflect accountability commitments, maintain audit trails, publish transparency reports, embed human oversight where appropriate, and build privacy-enhancing and bias-mitigation tools directly into their systems.

Regulators, meanwhile, are encouraged to take a proportionate, risk-based approach, focusing on harms that threaten life, livelihood or safety, and to coordinate across ministries and agencies through the committee-proposed AI Governance Group (AIGG) to ensure consistent oversight.

Organisations are expected to update internal policies and governance structures to define responsibilities at each stage of development and deployment. The report recommends publishing transparency reports and offering grievance channels that are easy for users to access.