India's AI law: consultation paper due in weeks, Vaishnaw says

India will publish a consultation paper on regulating artificial intelligence (AI) "in the coming weeks", Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the NDTV World Summit in New Delhi in the last week of October 2026. "We are drafting the consultation paper, and that paper will gather inputs from society, citizens and industry," the minister said, according to reports. He said the risks from AI had reached a point where a law and new regulations are warranted, and that the government was already working on it.

India has so far handled AI mainly through advisories, guidelines and existing laws such as the Information Technology Act, 2000. A consultation paper is the first formal step towards dedicated rules. It sets out the government's thinking and asks the public, companies, researchers and civil society to respond before any law is drafted. What goes into it will shape how AI products are built and sold in India for years.

For start-ups, the stakes are high. India has a fast-growing community of AI companies building chatbots, tools for Indian languages, health and finance applications and AI agents, which are programs that can take actions on a user's behalf. Clear rules can help them by setting out what is allowed and building public trust. Poorly designed rules can raise compliance costs that small companies struggle to bear, while large global firms absorb them easily. That is why founders and industry bodies are likely to watch closely for how the paper treats smaller companies and whether it scales obligations to the level of risk.

For citizens, the minister's focus on human control and on the ability to stop AI systems that go wrong speaks to growing worries about deepfakes, which are AI-generated fake videos, images or audio, and about automated systems making decisions without human checks. The consultation is the moment when ordinary users, teachers, parents and experts can say what protections they want.

Once the paper is out, the usual next steps are a period for public comments, a review of responses and then draft rules or a draft bill, which would need further approval before becoming law.

Short-term: AI companies, start-ups, industry groups and civil-society organisations will prepare responses for the consultation once the paper is published.

Long-term: A dedicated AI framework could set India's rules on safety, deepfakes and accountability for AI agents, shaping how both Indian and global AI products operate in the country.

Who is affected: Indian AI start-ups and technology companies; global AI firms operating in India; users of AI tools; schools and educators; and regulators who will enforce any new rules.

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