'We welcome Western AI companies —but we are building our own too,' says Meity Addl Secretary Abhishek Singh

In artificial intelligence (AI), India does not "shy away" from rolling out the red carpet for Western companies but simultaneously, the country is also building up its own capabilities, a top Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) official while terming the country's AI approach as "open".

Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the India Mobile Congress, Meity Addl Secretary Abhishek Singh said, "We are one of those countries which doesn't shy away from letting the American companies or the Western companies to operate in India, while we build up our own capabilities.

"Our whole digital transformation, there have been countries which did not allow Google and Meta to establish shop there. And they built their own alternatives to that," Singh said.

The Meity official's comments come at a time when global AI companies such as OpenAI has announced that it is opening an office in New Delhi, Anthropic in Bengaluru and so on.

"While we let other companies who have built innovative projects, deploy them here, but it doesn't take away our efforts in trying to make Indian alternatives for those solutions," he added.

Singh noted that although India started late in the AI race, the government is currently making investments in ensuring that it is able to catch up with Western majors. "We do hope that we'll be able to catch up with the best and we'll be able to build Indian alternatives for that," he added.

IT ministry secretary S Krishnan, while echoing similar sentiments, said, "We are an open economy, and global technology companies have always operated in India."

Krishnan said that there has been a significant economic contribution, both in research and development and jobs because of global technology companies.

"The platforms they've created have also provided economic opportunities for people to drive businesses and so on. So I think, to some extent, the value and the importance of that contribution needs to be recognised," Krishnan added.

In that context, Krishnan said that the IT ministry has been constantly pushing for world class Indian alternatives."MeitY has been constantly a champion of India becoming a product nation and not necessarily just being a software service provider," he added.