Biography
Biography pending.
Conference contributions 1
AI, EPISTEMIC INFRASTRUCTURE, AND INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION:
A perspective
Artificial intelligence in the Global South raises a question that is also a provocation: who builds knowledge, and under what material conditions? India sits somewhat awkwardly in this picture. Its institutional ambitions are real (the India AI Mission's cabinet-approved ₹10,372 crore outlay, AICTE's declaration of 2025 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence across 14,000+ institutions), but ambition and structural position are different things, and India's structural position remains that of a country whose AI ecosystem depends heavily on tools built elsewhere, for other people. This paper examines AI adoption in Indian higher education through that lens. Drawing on NEP 2020, the India AI Mission, AICTE mandates, and recent survey data on institutional uptake, it argues that India's current trajectory reproduces existing hierarchies of knowledge production. The dependence on anglophone platforms (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft) trained on data that skews toward Western epistemological norms is the clearest instance of this. An AI infrastructure that cannot adequately process Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali is doing something more consequential than failing a usability test; it is, in Santos's terms, a vector for epistemicide. The paper also takes seriously the material conditions that underpin this. The digital divide between urban and Tier 2/3 institutions, the documented unpreparedness of faculty (only 17% qualify as advanced AI users), and the data poverty of Indian HEIs are not incidental frictions in an otherwise sound policy framework. They reflect a deeper problem: that India's AI ambitions are being pursued within an architecture never designed with the Global South in mind. The paper ends with a proposal for what equity-first, epistemically sovereign AI policy in Indian higher education would actually require, with Indic-language model development and community-grounded data governance at its centre.