India’s digital success is now a vulnerability

This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. Counting is always political. Who gets counted, what gets counted, and how the counting is done are not just technical choices but acts of power. So when the International Monetary Fund’s index places India 71st on AI preparedness while Stanford’s index puts it among the top five, the gap is more than a measurement error. It reflects a difference in their politics. In India we have spent decades being assessed by indices designed elsewhere, by people asking questions framed to elicit answers that play to their interests and fashions. The Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations’ annual State of India’s Digital Economy (SIDE) report, now in its fourth edition and extended this year to 71 countries is an attempt to correct that. By building its own framework, India has begun to do for itself what others have long done to it: decide what counts. There are three reasons why this matters.…