Building AI the Indian Way: Startups, Scale, and the Billion-Person Brief

It doesn’t start with sci-fi.

It starts with a farmer in Andhra Pradesh checking an AI-powered forecast before sowing seeds. With a sanitation worker in Indore training to operate a manhole-cleaning robot. With a small vendor getting a loan—not from a bank, but from an algorithm that understands his bill payments better than a credit score ever did.

AI Rising: India’s Artificial Intelligence Growth Story by Jayanth N. Kolla and Leslie D’Monte reads like a snapshot of a country building its AI future—not in clean labs or Silicon Valley-style moonshots, but in messy markets, multilingual classrooms, and remote villages still buffering.

This is AI, made in India.

Kolla and D’Monte don’t pretend it’s all seamless. They open on a world where ChatGPT headlines and AI-powered search engines dominate global tech chatter, but remind us: India’s story isn’t imported. It’s patched together from real constraints—spotty data, fragmented infrastructure, and a billion-person puzzle of languages, regions, and use cases.

Still, progress is everywhere. In agriculture, AI tools help farmers read the monsoon. In healthcare, algorithms flag early signs of eye disease or interpret MRIs faster than overburdened radiologists. In disaster zones, drones deliver aid long before road crews can arrive.

UPI? That’s AI in the bloodstream—fraud detection on the backend, seamless flow on the frontend. It turned QR codes into a currency of trust. And in education, AI is helping scale multilingual content and personalize learning across gaps of geography, bandwidth, and background.

But AI Rising doesn’t pitch a techno-utopia. It pauses on the cracks.

What happens when algorithms score people unfairly? When private firms hoard personal data? When models trained on urban behavior fail in rural use cases? The digital divide is still real. Connectivity isn’t universal. Devices are unevenly distributed. And in a country where language isn’t just a feature but a culture, AI stumbles more than it soars.

There are global parallels. China’s super-app ecosystem lets AI ride on mobile rails. The West leans on cloud-first models and deep VC pockets. India is writing its own version—balancing startup scrappiness with corporate ambition. Reliance and Adani battle for the infrastructure layer, while Google and Meta chase language and reach. But it’s not just giants—grassroots startups are writing bold lines of code in small towns, for real problems.

Policy, here, matters as much as code. The authors shine a light on the role of NITI Aayog and the need for real regulatory scaffolding—rules that keep AI centered on citizens, not just corporations. Ethics isn’t a side quest. It’s part of the spec.

And between every big idea, AI Rising drops human stories: sanitation robots saving lives. Drones flying flood relief to places no road touches. AI giving small-town entrepreneurs the push they’ve waited a decade for. Genrobotics turning caste-bound work into skilled tech jobs.

That’s the real undercurrent: AI not as existential threat, but as toolset. One that requires the builder’s mindset. Constant tweaks. Cultural awareness. Guardrails. Vision.

For indie hackers, startup teams, and policy architects alike, this is the call: don’t wait for imported playbooks. Build for what’s in front of you. The gaps in inclusion, the problems of language, the need for dignity in design—these aren’t bugs. They’re the brief.

Tomorrow’s India won’t be coded by accident. It’ll be built—block by block, model by model—by those who show up with enough imagination to prototype and enough clarity to question the hype.

Because AI isn’t destiny.

It’s a design challenge.

And India’s already building it.