Rising Bharat Summit 2026 Highlights: Aiming for pollution-free Delhi with new EV policy and record e-bus fleet, says CM Rekha Gupta

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We have started Atal Canteens which provides food at Rs 5; we will provide cylinders to women this Holi.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We have decided on a priority list; Delhi's populace need water pipeline, education, these will be delivered first.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: Delhi's women will be provided with financial assistance, we are preparing an eligibility list.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We will do this with an online portal, so that there are no leakages and no one is left out.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: Delhi having a single party at all three levels of government is a great thing, there is no fight for taking credit.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We are working towards cleaning of Yamuna river, we have done drone mapping of all drains. We have revived all 35 sewage treatment plants.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We have taken out tenders to create decentralised STP.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We have setup the first biogas plant of Delhi after coming to power.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We will move ahead with public partnership

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: We will provide solutions in every sector to tackle pollution problem. This is not time-bound, it is an ongoing process.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta : We will deliver better AQI this October.

Delhi CM Rekha Gupta: I agree that freebies are dangerous for a city to prosper. But we need to support the bottom of pyramid.

People who ruled for 11 years, are asking questions of us after a year. We are following a scientific roadmap: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM: Delhi will be pollution free, we are working on vehicular pollution. We implemented no PUC, no fuel and we have delivered largest e-bus fleet.

Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM: We are going to bring a new EV policy for Delhi to encourage private vehicle owners to adopt clean fuel technologies.

Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM: We are working on pollution in a planned manner, we have classified ridge area as forest which no other government has done.

People have done justice and courts will also deliver justice: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

Congress is party that people pushed below NOTA in Delhi: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

They (Congress) are a directionless party: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

365 days is not a long period, we have worked hard with dedication for the people of Delhi: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

Kejriwal's government was involved in multitude of scams; if they were not corrupt, why did they take back the liquor policy: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

Lower court's decision is not final, we have seen corruption from our own eyes. Everytime a file opens, we find evidence of corruption: Rekha Gupta, Delhi CM

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: We will have to negotiate our way so that our interest in Chabahar are sustained and it brings us benefits in terms of access to Central Asia and Afghanistan.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: In the recently concluded international fleet review, our strategic autonomy is distinct in that we were able to get Americans, Iranians on the table.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: India's ability to strike, align and engage with different countries has shone over the years.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: This is a time when you have a situation where everyman for himself. It is better we don't get into diplomatic domain.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: Operation Sindoor was an important learning experience, primacy of standout weapons, airpower and unmanned systems. They revealed strengths and capability voids.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary:We have got a significant jump in modernisation budget of 24% for FY27. We will need more fighters, refuelers and AWACS.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: Events (Iran and Israel conflict) are moving pretty fast, we are in an oasis in a world facing geopolitical conflicts

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: We have stakes in middle East and large diaspora and we will have to continue our strategic partnerships.

Rajesh Kumar Singh, Defence Secretary: We hope things will settle down, both for our own interest from point of oil supplies and also for people in those countries.

Ankit Mehta, CEO, ideaForge: Since 2020, there has been fast track procurement in defence

Ankit Mehta, CEO, ideaForge: The new DAP is strengthening the procurement process further.

Ankit Mehta, CEO, ideaForge: The process of adaptation of technology is now weeks, rather than months or years.

Vivek Mishra, CEO, Raphe mPhibr: Hundreds of drones of ours is deployed in high altitude areas

Vivek Mishra, CEO, Raphe mPhibr: Right now our drones are being used for logistics , from anything from ammunitions to supplies

Spiros Margaris, Margaris Ventures: Americans are better not only at producing great AI solutions but also market it better. That's something India has to do more. Hence, the perception from outside is not as strong as it should be from its talent.

Shashi Shekhar Vempati, DeepTech for Bharat Foundation: India's language diversity is often looked as a barrier but it is also a great opportunity. With models like Sarvam and BharatGen, you can open up opportunities in every part of India.

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: Our biggest strength has been talent. Almost every Big Tech company relies a lot on Indian talent. Unfortunately, our talent leaves India and goes to the West where there are able to access funding and support from the Big Tech ecosystem and create IP there.

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: What the AI Summit has changed is that people are looking if the talent is here, why don't we invest in the talent within India, so that IP gets created here.

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: The 38,000 GPUs have not been procured by the government. Had we procured it, it would have cost Rs 20,000 crore. We came out with a strategy incentivising the private strategy to invest into the compute infrastructure. The actual compute expenditure is over Rs 20,000 crore.

Abhishek Singh from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said Indian AI models will improve rapidly with greater adoption and can compete with the world’s best.

“The pace at which models are evolving and becoming better. Models become better with usage. The more we start using Indian models, they will become better versions,” Singh said, emphasising the importance of domestic adoption.

Highlighting performance benchmarks, he added, “In many Indian language benchmarks, Sarvam's model has performed way better than any other top models. Fully confident that our sovereign models can compete with the best, only condition is we should be willing to use them.”

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: Inferencing in applications across key public sectors like agriculture, education, healthcare will be funded by govt in many ways. In strategic sectors like defence, we will set our own GPU infrastructure within the govt datacentres.

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: We are coming with a policy which incentivises the private sector to invest into the compute infrastructure. Part of GPUs will be offered by private sector incentivised by govt for the larger AI ecosystem.

MeitY's Abhishek Singh: Given the size of our country, if 10-20 crore people start using these services for various purposes, we will need to upend the backend infrastructure. 100,000 to 200,00 GPUs will be minimum we will need to meet the demand of India.

We have 62,000 GPUs. That was sufficient for training the first set of models, says MeitY's Abhishek Singh

Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam AI, said Indian AI models are now competing with the best globally, while preserving the country’s linguistic diversity.

“We have the world's best models even in terms decoding documents, even recognising tables. This is a whole idea of strength within, for centuries we have been thinking that we need to learn English. But, now the strength within is also preserving what is natively yours. Language is no longer a barrier,” Kumar said.

Calling this a pivotal moment for the country, he added, “This is going to be India's definitive decade to build.”

Highlighting the capability of their reasoning models, Kumar said, “Our Team ran some JEE papers and our models got the questions on Math and Physics better. This is a reasoning model. We have trained it on world data including India. We are able to say that this is the data or raw material we have used and this is what it is capable of.”

On the broader impact of AI, he said, “AI leads to productivity no matter what we are doing, including building AI. Our journey is clear, we can train models with lesser resources, but from there we want to step up and compete with global models.”

Kumar’s remarks reflect growing confidence within India’s AI ecosystem about building globally competitive technology rooted in local strengths.

Pratyush Kumar, Cofounder Sarvam AI: "Over the last two years, out of Bangalore, has proved that you can build globally competitive models as competitive with our own data and engineering"

Kumar: India can train its own state-of-the-art models and India can now build AI to reach billions of people. I mean we have built it already.

Kumar: Budget speech was live dubbed by us on a network, FM was speaking in English and we live translated it to Hindi and Kannada, language is no longer a barrier.

Artificial intelligence, deeper penetration into Bharat and the rise of homegrown brands will power the next phase of India’s consumption and supply chain transformation, logistics executives said during a panel discussion at the News18 Rising Bharat Summit in New Delhi on February 28.

Leaders from DTDC Express, Shiprocket and Citymall said India’s commerce landscape is being reshaped by domestic manufacturing momentum, expanding demand from Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns, and AI-led efficiencies across fulfilment and delivery.

Executives stressed that the next leg of growth will be driven by smaller towns and value-conscious consumers rather than just rapid delivery in metros.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - Indian workforce is extremely well educated. We as a group source talent from India to send them abroad and sometimes they come back to contribute, again, to the Indian business. We see India as a manufactory, manufactory for talents that is really helpful for the entire group.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - Value is more important than volume. As I said, premiumization, which has been a strategy that we have applied worldwide and in India for many years means, we really want to push consumer to drink, better.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - We have this sustainable development goal which are very measurable, and we must apply them in India, because India represent 1/3rd of the volume

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - Value is more important than volume. As I said, premiumization, which has been a strategy that we have applied worldwide and in India for many years means, we really want to push consumer to drink, better.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - We are supportive of free trade agreements and I think it really bring opportunities, both ways. This UK FTA and the EU FTA great opportunities.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - We play in the premium segment of spirits and with the rise of the income of Indian average income, but also the disposable income, which is disproportionately growing, we are seeing more and more people interested in our categories

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - We cannot rely only on Metro cities. Metro are important for us but it's not enough so we do capture to the entire country. And you see disproportionate growth there so this is really, really, a strategy that we have

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - India is a young country, and we have approximately 20 to 25 million new legal drinking age, joining the cohort of potential drinkers in this country. Some of them choose not to drink, and it's perfectly okay.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard - Gen Z consuming less is debatable, and you may see some people consuming less, but it's fine. We have always been here with a strategy of premiumization.

Vishal Sikka, Founder of Vianai Systems and former Infosys CEO: As a society I am worried about AI; no doubt it will create job displacement

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard India: You need to be relevant for the local population in the different states in India. Media is not the only way to reach consumer for our industry.

Jean Touboul, CEO, Pernod Ricard India: India and it was said before, is not a market where you apply only global recipes you have to be locally relevant.

Maths aided AI and computing has a tremendous future. It is important to separate things that require imagination and creativity from the jobs we have done. The mechanical, automated jobs their time is up: Vishal Sikka

Vishal Sikka, Founder of Vianai Systems and former Infosys CEO: Incredible new professions are emerging. Engineering is becoming extremely important.  Anything physical, around civil engineering, mechanical, energy, power, environment are becoming very important. Arts and humanities, human-oriented professions like nursing, personal care is become critical.

Mohammad Shami: I prefer local languages for commentary in sports, India has so many languages, English doesn't always connect with the people in villages. I also speak and understand Bengali, have been living in the state for over 22 years.

Senior players were very helpful when I was young in my captaincy, says former cricketer Mithali Raj. She added that young players were a little difficult to manage.

Yuzvendra Chahal, Cricketer: I dont think it's hard to miss any matches. It's a team game. If you are on the bench with the team, even if I dont play, winning match is a joint win. So, I am also a world champion.

Kamlesh Chandra Varshney, Whole Time Member, SEBI: Special emphasis on investor education, all our market intermediaries, institutions reaching out to villages, panchayats on the frauds taking place. With such kind of education, hopefully it will be better

Aditya B Chatterjee, MD, Equifax India: All the lenders have become very cautious. They have become very cautious on the ticket size. 
We are seeing that there is a direct effect of the ticket size and delinquency. Again, zero to 15,000 is a very high delinquency, but if we go to a loan above one lakh or two lakh, it becomes very secure.

Hemant Gala, CEO, PhonePe Lending: At Phone Pe, in a very sustainable way, we are ensuring that customers in tier three four five cities towns, villages get access. Likewise merchants who were not being able to access credit, have a sustainable flow of credit.

Hemant Gala, CEO, PhonePe Lending: Formalisation phase coming, which leads to data understanding of structure data formats to be able to figure out what is the credit spending , how to lend and how to give money to people.

Kamlesh Chandra Varshney, Whole Time Member, SEBI: Now that verified tick is available only on those apps which have been verified. So that is a very important step which has been taken. 
We are very thankful to Google, who has helped us in doing this. We are still negotiating with Apple.

Kamlesh Chandra Varshney, Whole Time Member, SEBI: We can say our market system us unique and we have several safeguards for the investors.

Kamlesh Chandra Varshney, Whole Time Member, SEBI: We can proudly say there are some initiatives that we have taken to protect market and investors interest, which no other country has done. We are doing things on our own. T+1 settlement was done in India first, US followed after us.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday launched a sharp attack on the Indian National Congress, saying the party’s recent shirtless protest had “exposed its ideological bankruptcy” and hurt India’s image at a time of global engagement.

Speaking at the News18 Rising Bharat Summit 2026, Modi on February 27 said the protest during the AI Summit was an attempt to malign the country in front of foreign delegates.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India is now a rising global power, with the world taking notice of all our actions, citing the recently held AI Impact Summit in New Delhi as an example.

“Until a few years ago, India's events were ignored and not paid attention to. Our actions today are discussed around the world, like the AI summit,” PM Modi claimed at the Rising Bharat Summit 2026 on February 27.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Friday, framed India’s rise over the past decade as a civilizational and economic awakening, arguing that the country has shed its “slave mentality,” rediscovered its inherent strength, and emerged as a decisive global player, even as he launched a sharp political attack on the Congress for what he called “blind opposition” to national achievements. Read the full transcript here

Day 2 promises an equally diverse lineup spanning spirituality, regulation and fintech. The stage will feature UK-based bhajan clubbing artist and bhakti yoga teacher Radhika Das; Kamlesh Chandra Varshney of the Securities and Exchange Board of India; Hemant Gala of PhonePe; Ashok Hariharan of IDfy; and Aditya B Chatterjee of Equifax India. Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta is also set to address the summit, adding a strong political dimension to the second day's conversations.

Trade strategy took centre stage in Bharat Unstoppable, where Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal spoke about engaging developed economies and the status of the India-US trade deal from a position of strength. Meanwhile, Deal or Dilution? saw Prof Biswajit Dhar, Gurcharan Das and Ajay Srivastava debate India's trade calculus amid evolving US policy.

Markets and capital flows formed another key pillar of Day 1. In Institutions: The Market's North Star, investors such as Ramesh Damani and Vijay Kedia debated AI proxies, "anti-AI" sectors and long-term discipline in investing. In The Golden Touch, David Tait of the World Gold Council detailed how geopolitics, central bank buying and rising ETF participation are shaping gold markets.

The Rising Bharat Summit opened with a strong focus on technology, markets and India's global positioning. In the inaugural session, Union Telecom Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia described digital connectivity as the lifeblood of a modern nation, highlighting India's rapid 5G rollout and ambitions to shape 6G standards. The technology push continued with Ashwini Vaishnaw emphasising India's high AI diffusion, the need for robust AI infrastructure and semiconductor capacity. In The Future of Finance is Now, Hitesh Sethia of Jio Financial Services outlined an AI-powered, highly personalised financial ecosystem.