Aman Kumar grew up selling newspapers across villages in Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh, before school each morning. Years later, those same newspapers became his window to scholarships, youth programs and opportunities he hadn’t known existed. Long before he encountered terms like “digital divide” or “inclusive governance,” he had lived their consequences.
That experience brought him to New Delhi, where UNESCO convened consultations for the India AI Readiness Assessment Report, an eighteen-month initiative drawing more than 600 stakeholders from government, academia, startups and civil society. Aman was one of the few voices in the room carrying the perspective of communities these policies are most likely to affect.
“Young people don’t want to remain passive observers,” he stated. “They want to contribute.”
Growing up, he watched talented peers quietly exit education into factory work, not for lack of ability, but because opportunity never reached them. What struck him wasn’t the loss itself, but how silently it happened.
“Sometimes exclusion begins long before people realize they are excluded,” he said. “If a child pushed by poverty turns toward labour, society calls it unfortunate. If the same child turns toward crime, society calls him criminal. But very few ask what kind of exclusion pushed him there.“
Now in his early twenties, he carries that question with him as he thinks about the future of artificial intelligence.
UNESCO, in partnership with the IndiaAI Mission and Ikigai Law, and supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, launched the India AI Readiness Assessment Report at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 on 16 February in New Delhi. The report maps both India’s strengths and the possibilities ahead: the country accounts for 16% of global AI talent and has filed over 86,000 AI patents since 2010, with notable progress in multilingual AI and digital public service delivery. It also identifies areas of improvement, such as the need for a comprehensive legal gap analysis to better assess risks, and more inclusive AI transition planning to prevent widening inequalities, particularly in the informal sector.
For Aman, that framing is precisely the point. He sees a direct line between the information gaps he witnessed growing up and the governance gaps that could define the AI era.
“If policies are designed without listening to communities,” he said, “technology can reproduce the same inequalities that already exist.”
The report’s roadmap calls for co-developing guidelines for operationalising ethical AI principles, strengthening centre-state coordination in AI governance and implementation, advancing public trust in AI through greater awareness, and ensuring targeted interventions to promote diversity in the AI workforce and research ecosystem. These aren’t abstract goals in a country of India’s scale, they require the kind of participation that Aman’s presence in the consultation room was meant to represent.
India has the world’s largest youth population, 371 million people between the ages of 15 and 29, and more than half the country is under 25. This is the generation AI will most reshape. Yet only 44% of India’s internet users have ever interacted with an AI-enabled feature, and access itself remains uneven, only 3.8% of rural households have high-speed fiber connections, compared to 15.3% in urban areas. The report’s central argument holds: AI readiness extends beyond infrastructure. It requires inclusive participation from the communities that AI will most transform. Aman’s trajectory, from a village in western Uttar Pradesh to national conversations on AI governance, is the argument for why that inclusion matters. And his presence in the consultation room was itself a small proof of concept: that the distance between excluded and participant is not fixed.
read more: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unescos-ai-consultations-grassroots-youth-leader-pushes-inclusion?hub=701
