New Delhi, May 11 -- As India's digital public infrastructure scales to billions of transactions and users, the next phase of the country's digital transformation will depend on building trusted, AI-ready data platforms that can balance innovation with accountability, according to Mayank Baid, Regional Vice President, India & South Asia at Cloudera, a US-based hybrid data, analytics and AI platform company.
Speaking at a time when India is accelerating investments in AI-led governance, digital identity systems and sovereign data infrastructure, Baid said platforms such as Aadhaar, Goods and Services Tax Identification Number (GSTN), UPI and DigiLocker have demonstrated how open and interoperable digital systems can scale nationally while continuing to drive innovation.
"India's digital platforms demonstrate how large and complex public systems that are built on open and interoperable infrastructure can scale sustainably and foster innovation," Baid said. He added that modern data platforms can further strengthen trusted identity frameworks and seamless digital transactions across urban and rural India.
The comments come amid growing policy focus on AI governance and sovereign digital infrastructure under the IndiaAI Mission. India's digital economy is projected to contribute nearly 20% of GDP by 2030, while UPI is already processing more than 20 billion transactions a month.
The broader conversation around sovereign AI and trusted infrastructure has also been gaining momentum across the industry. In an earlier interview with TechCircle, Deloitte India's S Anjani Kumar argued that India must prioritise sovereign GPU cloud infrastructure and localised AI ecosystems to strengthen data security, domestic AI innovation and national competitiveness.
Similarly, recent discussions around enterprise AI adoption have highlighted how CIOs and technology leaders are increasingly focusing on sovereign cloud, explainable AI and compliant data architectures as generative AI deployments move from experimentation to production environments.
Baid said India's next digital growth phase would require public infrastructure capable of delivering not just scale, but also intelligence, resilience and trust. "The next phase is about banking on this momentum to unlock intelligence for actively driving better policy, faster services and smarter economic outcomes to achieve long-term national competitiveness," he said.
Cloudera has also expanded its long-standing partnership with GSTN as part of what the company describes as one of the world's largest indirect tax data modernisation programmes. The company provides data and analytics infrastructure supporting more than 13 million registered businesses on the GST network.
Baid said trusted data platforms will become the "constitutional layer" of India's AI economy, particularly as governments globally grapple with concerns around explainability, auditability and citizen trust in AI systems.
"At this inflection point trusted data platforms will form the constitutional layer of India's AI economy to enable accountability by design," he said. "Central to this is data sovereignty that ensures data is collected, stored and processed within the national jurisdiction."
According to Baid, India's digital public infrastructure already offers examples of how accountability and trust can be embedded at scale. "Aadhaar, GSTN and UPI are prime examples of accountability, traceability and reliability that can be built on consent, and secure at the core," he said, adding that such systems help create AI-ready datasets while preserving national sovereignty.
The executive also stressed the need for governance frameworks that evolve alongside AI adoption across public infrastructure. Rather than relying only on static regulation, governance models must span the entire AI lifecycle - from data origination and model training to deployment and monitoring - to ensure transparency and traceability.
"As AI becomes integral to public platforms, governance must evolve from static regulation to active stewardship that scales trust alongside innovation," Baid said.
He pointed to India's responsible AI principles and emerging AI governance frameworks as early steps toward creating explainable and accountable AI systems capable of sustaining citizen trust at the national scale.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.