MahaAI Building Safe Secure & Smart Governance

Artificial intelligence is real and it is influencing governance, markets, public services and even geopolitics. The question before us is not whether AI will shape governance. The question is whether governance is going to shape the artificial intelligence. It’s transforming governance in fundamental ways today. Through decision intelligence, public service delivery at scale and national security and strategic stability. Moreover, the governance challenge becomes uniquely complex as AI introduces speed, opacity to a level, concentration, global reach and dual use. This creates a governance paradox. Regulate too slowly and risk harm. Regulate too slowly and risk harm. Regulate too heavily and risk stagnation. The answer is not control versus innovation. The answer is intelligent governance. Therefore, the principle of AI governance should necessarily include human -centered design, transparency and accountability, risk -based regulations, global cooperation, and adaptive policies.

AI does not recognize borders. We need interoperable frameworks, shared safety standards, and cooperative oversight mechanisms. Governance frameworks must evolve as the artificial intelligence evolves. Static policies cannot manage dynamic intelligence. In this era, we move from individual, national -level policies to coordinated global norms, and that’s the necessity for today. History will not judge us by our sophisticated algorithms. It will judge us by the wisdom of our governance. The industrial revolution reshaped economies. The digital revolution reshaped communication. The AI revolution will reshape decision -making itself. With that power comes great responsibility. The digital revolution which we are undergoing today, surely we stand at crossroads. One path leads to inequity, instability and uncontrolled disruption. The other leads to augmented human capability, smart governance and inclusive prosperity.

The difference between these futures will not be determined by machines. It will be determined by us, the policy makers, the people who use it and each and every person who is involved in the process of AI governance. Therefore, we need to commit today to ourselves for building AI systems that are safe, secure, transparent, equitable and sustainable. and aligned with core human values. And that’s what we are going to discuss here today. Last but not the least, the message that this panel discussion and the fireside chat is going to give is let us govern intelligence with wisdom. Thank you so much.

Thank you, sir. We are truly honored to have with us today a leader who has been forefront of technology -driven governance in Maharashtra. I now request Shri Ashish Shailar Sir, Honorable Minister of IT and Cultural Affairs, Government of Maharashtra, to grace us with a keynote address.

Good morning to everybody. Respected guests, dignitaries, Excellencies and all the policy makers, members of the media, dear friends, young challengers, ladies and gentlemen. Namaskar, Vande Mataram and a very good morning to all. India today is not merely hosting an AI summit. India is helping to ride the operating system of AI age. We meet at Bharat Mandapam under the banner Maha AI, building safe, secure and smart governance. As a part of AI Impact Summit 2026, the first in its global series to be hosted in the global south. Over 20 heads of state, 60 ministers and hundreds of AI leaders from the industry and academia are here. Reflecting a shared vision. A shared conviction that AI must be inclusive, responsible and resilient.

I hereby say under the leadership of Chief Minister Devendra Fadanvisi, Maharashtra has positioned itself as a living laboratory for AI in governance. Our partnership with global technology leaders, for example, our AI -powered Mahak Crime OS, showcased by Microsoft’s Satya Nadellaji, has already transformed how we prevent, detect and investigate crime, faster response, shorter investigation cycles and more transparent processes. Simultaneously, our state digital agency, Mahaiti, is building what we call an intelligent government infrastructure, a cloud native, and a cloud -based infrastructure. modular, API -driven backbone that uses AI to integrate services, predict needs, and respond in real -time. This spans smart recruitment, AI -based property mapping for urban local bodies, real -time urban dashboard for traffic, weather, and civic issues, and pilots in flood management and smart mobility.

The philosophy is simple. Use AI not to distance the state from the citizens, but to make governance more human, faster, more responsive, and more inclusive. In other words, scale empathy through insight. Across the world, public sectors are resting with the same three imperatives. So better safeguard digital sovereignty. and adopt AI responsibly. Many countries have realized that interportal, public, date and robust AI governance are becoming strategic infrastructure at par with energy, transport or telecom. For Maharashtra, Maha AI is our response to this challenge. A safe, secure, smart governance stack must rest on five pillars. Computers, compute and cloud at scale number one, high quality public data sets number two, state AI governance number three, and interpolarity and standards number four, and capacity building is number five.

Smart governance is not only about deploying chatbots or dashboards. It is about building resilient, auditable, human -centered, AI systems. into the nerve systems of cities and states, transport, energy, public safety, urban planning, disaster response and welfare delivery, without trustworthy air governance, smart cities’ risk opacity, bias, security breaches and erosion of public trust. In Maharashtra, we see internet health as a core policy concern, just as physical health is essential for individuals, digital health is essential for societies. Disinformation, deepfakes, AI -generated fraud and cyberattacks can undermine democracies, markets and communities with unprecedented speed. Our response must be combined. That is robust cyber security, digital literacy and critical thinking, hybrid verification ecosystem. and that is our response as far as our state is concerned.

I am really happy to be the part of this summit and at the same time giving a response addressing the challenges and our ecosystem under the name of Mahayaya and therefore we are here to present our case as a building safe, secure, smart governance and appeal all the best of the technologies and platforms of the world to associate, coexist and work with us. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Thank you, sir. Your vision for a digitally empowered Maharashtra truly sets the tone for everything we will discuss today. And now the highlight of today’s session. May I request all the panelists to join us on the stage please Sri Praveen Pardeshi Sir Yashasvi Adav Sir Dr. Anupam Chattopadhyay Dr. Amit Kapoor Mr. Suresh Sethi Major Ranjit Goswami Ms. Bina Sarkar Mr. Dev Rukhdar Davinder Sandhu Dr. Ganesh Ramakrishnan Vikash Chandra Rastogi Sir Rajesh Agarwal Sir Mr. Suresh Sethi Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Shri Yashastri Yadav, Additional Director General of Police, Maharashtra Cyber Department, Government of Maharashtra, Dr. Anupam Chattopadhyay, Associate Professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Dr. Amit Kapoor, Chair, Institute for Competitiveness, Mr.

Suresh Sethi, Managing Director and CEO, Protean EGov Technologies, Major Ranjit Goswami, Head, Corporate Affairs, Tata Consultancy Services, Ms. Beena Sarkar, Customer Success Executive Service Now, and moderating this conversation is Mr. Devaroop Dhar, Co -Founder and CEO, Primus Partners. I now hand over to Mr. Devaroop Dhar to moderate this session.

Thank you, Aditi, and a warm welcome to all our panel members. I’ll start with Praveen Paradesi, sir. So, sir, at Mitra, you have been experimenting a lot with AI. There are multiple AI initiatives which have been taken. If you could share your thoughts, your vision as we start this.

So first, the most important thing about AI is getting our energy, some of the hard things right. So one is energy because, you know, remember President Trump just mentioned that why should we be paying for Indians who are processing most of our answers. So I think we are pushing on green energy, more than 19 ,000 megawatts of that to come up at solar level. So that’s the fuel for AI in future. The second is that capacity building. So all our staff from Mitra and a lot of our other departments, we went to this AI university and gave them a course. And we also hope that there will be online courses available on IGOT where government staff can become empowered to use AI.

Then we look at what is the impact on the economy. So the impact on the economy, mostly people are concerned about the jobs. And that’s a real issue. One analysis from NITI. Shows that from 1950. to 2020, all highly educated people with postgraduate degrees, engineers, they are the ones who had a 95 % plus chance of getting jobs. But from 2020 till now, 0 .65 % is the rate at which physical jobs, that is, masons, bricklayers, home carers, their value and their employability is increasing vis -a -vis highly educated ones. So this is the impact of AI. So how should we do this better? One is, of course, as our Secretary IT mentioned, making it available in government, ensuring seamless access to services.

But other aspects which we don’t look at, which we are working through our state data authority, is how do we also encash the data at a large scale? Because otherwise we become… a sitting target for people to just use India’s data for monetizing their own values. So two big examples are pharmaceuticals. India has the largest population and the number of diseases, experiments, et cetera. Now, this is all health data, and this is very valuable for pharma companies. So the state data authority is working on issues wherein we can make it a single source of proof, make it available also, and if there is a commercial possibility, make those resources available to India, that is to our government, and not to be cashed for free.

So these are some of the applications. Government issues many, many orders. We have issued more than 150 ,000 orders, which are called government GRs. And it’s a maze through which it’s very difficult even for government officers, whose departments it is, to understand what is the latest position on a complicated situation. So we are working with Professor Ganesh here from IIT Mumbai. So Mitra and we are working together with them. And we are working with the government to make sure that we are getting the best results. And we are working with the government to make sure that we are getting the best results. disentangle all these orders through a small language model, not a large language model, and so that you can query at two levels.

One, for the government officers. The government officers should be able to ask in any complicated situation, what is the latest position on whether an additional FSIF or a building permit can be given in this situation or not, what are the Supreme Court orders. And on the other hand, citizens should also be able to ask under those rules. So this is called Maha GPT, and hopefully this will be the first application, which is both available to government officers and to citizens. I stop here.

Thank you, sir, for sharing all these examples, wonderful examples. I’ll come to Yashishvi Yadav, sir. Cyber is another large user of AI. So if you could share your examples, your experience around how cyber is using AI.

Okay, so law enforcement and cyber security. is one of the major concerns for law enforcement agencies all over the world. And I would like to draw your attention that under the visionary leadership of our Chief Minister, Mr. Devinder Fadnavis, who had the foresight to use AI in law enforcement work about five years ago. So we have launched and implemented this Maharashtra Cyber Security Project, which generously borrows AI tools, technologies, algorithms. And we are fighting real crime with these technologies. And the USP of this project is that the best and the most state -of -the -art tools, technologies, experienced consultants in the field of cyber security, and experienced and professional police officers have all coalesced, under one roof.

And there is a live police station as well. So this is how cyber security is being embellished through this project. And the beauty is that the dark web monitoring, threat analysis, social media monitoring, or any type of cyber crime, sextortion, ransomware, cyber bullying, and a lot of other types which cyber crime takes. They can all be undertaken, handled by just one, on the fingertips by just one helpline number, 1930. So this agency, if any kind of cyber issue is with any citizen, they can just dial this 1930 number and all the cyber solutions will be provided by more than 150 cyber consultants. So a lot of AI tools are being used. And this is the reason why we are using this and seamlessly.

And the best part of this whole exercise is that in less than six months, more than 1000 crore of rupees, which would have gone into the hand of the scamsters have been frozen and are being ultimately returned to the victims. What a big relief to the victims. And more than 70 young girls who were being subjected to intense cyberbullying, blackmailing and sextortion and were on the verge of committing suicide because of very efficient AI tracking. They were prevented from taking the extreme step. And 70 lives have been saved in less than six months of its operation. So that’s how AI is at the forefront. Thank you. Is at the forefront of being the bulwark against cyber security concerns.

I would like to draw your attention to only one report that we generated. which is called Echoes of Pahalgam. Now, in that case, while the Indian Army was fighting a conventional war with Pakistan because of the Pahalgam incident, more than one million cyber attacks were launched by nation -state actors, whom we called as APT, groups from Indonesia, Pakistan, and even Turkey, and so many other countries. And they were thwarted by such AI tools, which we call as threat intelligence tools, like Luminar, Cognite, or Pathfinder, which are big data analytical tools. So in the dark net, we still find the traces of these cyber attacks. So cyber crime is now slowly progressing into cyber terrorism and cyber warfare.

So that is what we have to be very, very careful. and before I end this preliminary address, I would like to also draw your attention what beyond AI? A big, big threat is lurking. It is called quantum computing. Now quantum computing can do processes in qubits, hundreds of millions of qubits. It’s at speed and it can solve complex issues in less than six seconds which the best of supercomputers would take more than 50 years to do it immediately. So quantum computing can break the best of encryptions including RSA encryptions of the banking industry, including blockchain technology. Now if these encryptions are broken in less than few minutes, the whole financial system can be lopsided and lots of money can flow into actors or threat actors which we are not aware at all.

Bitcoin can be broken Even credit card Encryptions can be broken Banking systems, encryptions can be broken So right now we have to prepare What quantum computing Can give us as in terms of Pros and what can be The shortcomings or dangers Lurking because of quantum Computing, the cons So we have to prepare because China And other countries have already invested 15 billion dollars Or even close to 20 billion dollars We have invested only 1 billion Dollar till now So that’s how we have to catch up with Quantum computing before it’s too late So this is how cyber security And law enforcement perspective On AI And I would like to pass on the baton To the next speaker, thank you

Thank you sir, that was quite reassuring as well And since you spoke about quantum I want to bring in Dr. Anupam Chattopadhyay. Anupam, you’re working at the intersection of quantum and AI. So if you could share your thoughts, how are things moving in that direction? pooled into the product in order to help this. Thanks, Anupam, for giving a perspective, both from research as well as industry. So I’ll come to Suresh, you. So you’re working extensively in DPIs, and there’s a strong interaction between DPIs and AI. So from your experience, how are things moving in the DPI space, and how is AI influencing?

Thanks, Devroop. I think from a DPI perspective, we are all very familiar. We today have population -scale digital rates. And, you know, that puts us in a very sweet spot because today a lot of times when we start using or embedding AI into any technology, are we ready to embed AI or not? And I think there was reference to data sets, how is data organized, how can you enable AI on top of it? So I think, first of all, the population -scale DPI that we have, that gives us a significant advantage. Whether we talk about identity, we talk about our UPI rails, which is the payment and the transactional layer which comes on top of it.

And similarly, when we look at data itself, DigiLocker today has millions of authenticated documents that come into play over there. So while we have the digital infrastructure in place, if we can embed an intelligence layer on top of it, and if the question is around targeting subsidy, getting the right beneficiary, putting the money in the hands of the right person, that becomes a very, very important and significant leverage. I will just take two or three examples where we see AI playing a significant role. One is that as we move from static identity to dynamic eligibility. Now, we’ve seen it all happen. Today, we have digitally verifiable credentials. So the moment you are using static identity, you are only able to prove who you are, what do you do.

and then you are applying for getting some sort of benefits or subsidy coming through to you. But if you have verifiable credentials, these are credentials which are machine readable. We talk about the concept of blue dot, which technically means all of us have certain attributes which are associated with us. If these are available in a machine readable format, then AI can actually determine who is eligible for what subsidy. The second part comes to the fact saying, are we being reactive or can we do predictive governance? And predictive governance can be strongly enabled by AI because the moment you are having credentials which are digitally verifiable, you are actually able to predict who needs some sort of subsidy.

Now today, if there’s a distress in income and that can be tracked, you can trigger some sort of benefit to that and coming at a government level. If you can put data. consented data being shared with the government, the same can come through. And last but not least is the important part related to inclusion error and exclusion error. So when we talk about inclusion error, we are talking about leakages. When we are talking about exclusion, naturally we are saying the right person is not getting what is due to them. So your ability to be able to predict precision using verification is going to be very critical. Again, an AI layer can be embedded over there.

But all this very clearly, and we’ve heard it before, all this is very clearly important to have the guardrails around it. So AI should be explainable. The moment we are saying explainable, today a decision taken not to give benefits to somebody should be very clearly explained. And similarly, if there are benefits going out, that should also be explainable. The second part is auditable. So whatever we are doing, there has to be an audit layer over there to explain what has happened. And more importantly, there should be a human redressal pathway because ultimately you can’t put everything to machines. You have to have that human person coming into play and having accountability settled over there. So I think these are critical aspects which can make governance more predictive, more precise, and more proactive going forward by embedding an intelligence layer into the DBI.

Thanks, Suresh. I think very valid and meaningful points. I’ll come to Ranjit. Now, we’re talking about AI. There are a lot of happenings which are there. We have seen, we have heard about so many things at the summit. Now, a major tech company like TCS, which is doing a lot of work in this, how does large tech companies come in and collaborate with state governments? How can you enable that? What can be the steps in that?

Thank you, Devroop. I think… we need to first take a holistic view of what are we trying to achieve with AI. The tagline for this summit, if we go by that, welfare for all, happiness for all is very holistically kind of captures it. As coming from Tata Group, I am reminded that 170 years back almost, our founding father, Jamshedji Tata spoke about giving us the guidance saying that society or community is not another stakeholder in the business. It is the purpose as to why the business exists in the first place. Similarly, if we were to apply the same analogy over here today, I think AI is not a technical tool which is fundamentally going to make the governance more efficient.

It is fundamentally meant for how to bring the benefit, welfare and happiness to the community at large. If we try and approach the question from that perspective, it definitely comes out. And like even Suresh alluded to, how do we make sure that it is inclusive, the people get the right benefits that they are entitled to, and do not go to somebody who is not entitled to. The colleague from the police forces also spoke about as to how the criminal tracking and other things. These are translating the intent into action at the ground level. Lastly, when it comes to organizations like DCS, we believe that each department in the government firstly should not be treated in isolation.

Each department in the government should have the ability to have a common database of people, be able to extract the information, and ensure that the citizen is seen as a citizen of the state or the country, and not as a citizen of the department. So that common databasing is something that we are trying to approach. We have the Aadhaar database. Not every department is still connected to it. Of course, we are trying to find a reason as to how that can become the major point of it. So small steps like that, and of course, bringing in the platform’s intelligence to its core. That’s fundamentally the steps that we have taken.

Thanks, Ranjit. With that, I’ll go to Bina. Bina, I want to talk on the aspect of ethical AI biases, especially you work with women for ethical AI. How do you see biases or maybe biases around gender diversity creeping in and what needs to be done around this?

Thank you, Debru. So, yes, I do work. I volunteer with the Women for Ethical AI South Asia chapter. It’s powered by UNESCO. So one of the key questions that we ask ourselves is what are we solving for? Every time and I’ve been looking at the various solutions that are. Debuting or being showcased as part of the. India AI mission. Many a times when we look at a particular hardware or a piece of any new device through which we are delivering what we now call as AI services, mostly on large language models, I should say that. What we sometimes seem to miss is the wood for the trees. I will just give a very hard example over here.

We do know smart glasses is not a new phenomenon. It was introduced by Google Glasses way back in 2015, I remember 2013, 2015, 2016, about that range. One of the reasons why it was recalled was you had safety concerns because people were taking images, videos without consent. we have seen the return of these glasses and those concerns have not gone away and yet you see them in the market you see it in India being sold in every in any optic store, in my neighborhood optic store I have my colleagues who flaunt it saying that I am so cool, I have taken the latest piece of technology so when we talk about how do you build ethics and governance Yashasvi sir said you are the best, you are the best framework.

So what this means is we are not giving guns to everybody. Right. India has been very, very smart about it. Of course, there are certain countries where owning a gun is is fine. It’s as for their rights. That doesn’t mean India has to adopt it. Right. We have our very able police force. We have the Indian army. Right. So what is exciting outside? One needs to contextualize it, humanize it, see if it is threatening 50 percent of your population. I’m a part of that population and then decide whether it even needs to exist. In that market. So when you’re building out solutions and when you’re building out devices, we have the India Safety Institute. It has been instituted in 2025.

I do know that. What I would urge policymakers is that it should not, while we do have it and I do know we are working with Research Institute, industry, industry, ideally, if any new device comes like this, the first line of defense, so to speak, should be this institute. That actually should determine whether it actually creates a problem for the police force, for cyber security, right? Does it threaten 50 % of the population? We are already seeing it playing out in the UK, US. There is no policy that protects us. Even now, we are not protected as women. Leave women, even children, right? So I think that is something one really needs to take into consideration. While we love technology, trust me, as a lady, I find it extremely liberating to be able to create applications with just language.

But if you use that technology against us by bringing out devices and hardware that endanger us, I feel that’s where it breaks down. So you definitely, as part of ethics, you need to evaluate it from that framework. I call it the Kali versus the Rakta Bija effect. I’m sure some of you know that. Why would you create a Rakta Bija? Create a Kali.

So, Beena, I think a very valid point that you have made. With that, I’ll move to Dr. Amit Kapoor. We’re talking of AI and its impact and benefits. How do you see this benefit percolating? Next level of cities, tier 2, tier 3, other places.

So, Devru, this is a very important question. And as I was hearing all the panelists here, I would like to rake a few points. We definitely agree that, yes, AI can be transformational. But we have to understand a couple of points here. One of them is that, S2, what is the quality of education that we are giving so that people are able to use it in the right earnest? In fact, the issue that Bina was talking about is about ethics, education, and so on and so forth. The larger point here is when you talk about the skill development levels in Maharashtra, out of the 100 % or 9 crore workforce that you have, only about 20 % of them are at skill level 3 and 4.

80 % of them are at skill level 1 and 2. So if you have to move beyond that, you need to do something far greater. That means you need to embed your education system and build it very strongly. And then the second point out here is that how do we use, and if you really want to talk about tier 1 and 2, sorry, tier 2 and tier 3 cities, we have to also understand that what is the level of penetration and quality of internet in these locations. We can tom -tom about internet and everything, but the numbers are not very supportive right now. And you talk about internet and broadband connectivity. There are severe issues with this within the state of Maharashtra itself, which is supposedly one of the finest states in terms of internet connectivity itself.

The average speed of internet traffic in Bombay or in Mumbai is about 58 Mbps on a broadband network. When you are talking about usage of AI, and if you want to take it to the masses, then you have to have far better, deeper internet connectivity and broadband. I think it has to be done on a war footing. Not that we are not getting there, but it will have to be done faster and quicker. The second thing is going to be about inadequacy of supporting infrastructure. So this is where I also see that there is a tremendous level of opportunity that exists in Maharashtra to create this. Because if you really look at it, like 16 % of India’s workforce, IT workforce, or what you call a technology workforce sits in one single city in Maharashtra.

That is Pune. So if you’re really talking about it, that means Maharashtra has the potential, the talent to really take it to the next level. And that is where you have to build infrastructure. You will have to build what you call, when you talk about the data centers, et cetera, the opportunity does exist and things. And last but not the least is about, it’s going to be about cost and affordability. You will have to bring cost and affordability to these services as you go along. But having said that, I think the larger potential, we have not touched here. And when you talk about Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, this technology has a huge possible impact that can be done at Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and that is about nutrition.

Today, Maharashtra actually has a problem on nutrition. Fifty percent of the people in Maharashtra are malnourished even today. How do I use this technology to assess what is happening in my PIN code level or a smaller level of geography in various cities? And location. The second thing is about water and sanitation, access to basic knowledge. What about access to can AI solve my education problem in tier two and tier three cities? In fact, none of us is talking about the elephant in the room. And that elephant in the room is that we are all super excited about AI, but we are not understanding that AI is also going to be the biggest dumping down element for the society.

In fact, when you talk about AI itself, it is going to make bonobos out of us. People out here, when you actually use the doom scrolling, when you talk about Instagram, what is happening to our children? And that is exactly what AI is going to do. How do we set our education system right? That’s what you have to do in tier two and tier three cities. Last point, and that is about the higher education space itself. When you talk about your workforce, and close to about 50 % of it is underemployed. So I have to disagree with Praveen for one small point. He made a very powerful point in terms of saying that how after 2020, there has been a transformation.

In terms of how people are getting jobs, et cetera. I do agree with. But the larger point here is that we are also not preparing our workforce right, and that is happening in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. So we need to take it there. Potential exists. As of today, Maharashtra is the engine of growth in India. We cannot debate that. Even today, it is about close to 17 % to 18 % of India’s GDP, and it will define India’s growth story in the future, definitely. But if Maharashtra does it right, then the country can follow suit on this. And that is where things have to be.

Thank you, Dr. Amit. And thanks to all the panelists. So with that, we’ll come to the end of the panel discussion.

Thank you so much. Thank you to all our esteemed panelists and senior officers who are here. May I request all our panelists to just step forward for a photo? Very interesting, sir. May I request you to join our esteemed panelists? on this piece. Thank you. Thank you.