NEW DELHI — The Union Government is slated to release a comprehensive consultation paper on artificial intelligence in the coming weeks, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced. Speaking at a high-profile technology summit, Vaishnaw emphasized that the forthcoming framework will actively seek inputs from citizens, industry leaders, and multi-sector stakeholders to shape India's digital future.

Highlighting the core philosophy of the upcoming regulations, Vaishnaw asserted that the foundational principles are already settled: artificial intelligence must remain strictly human-centric, with total control over agents, models, processes, and outcomes anchored firmly in human hands.

"There has to be some equivalent of stopping things if they go out of control," Vaishnaw stated, underscoring the necessity of emergency kill switches and absolute operational safeguards.

Defining Real Human Control

As policymakers prepare to draft the framework, technology experts have urged the government to move beyond generalized concepts and enshrine concrete, enforceable technical mandates.

Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, a veteran artificial intelligence researcher and Chief Technology Officer at AiEnsured, emphasized that true human control must be explicitly defined in technical architectures.

"Human control requires blocking new tool calls, revoking access, cancelling pending jobs, and displaying action statuses," Padmanabhuni explained. He noted that terminating an automated agent is not synonymous with reversing its prior actions, necessitating built-in duplicate protections, comprehensive audit trails, and robust recovery procedures. Furthermore, these safety mechanisms must remain operational and testable mid-task across complex handoffs.

Experts suggest that regulatory requirements should scale dynamically based on risk profiles rather than rigid software labels, focusing heavily on observable autonomies such as tool integration, decision execution limits, and permission boundaries. High-risk sectors—particularly banking and financial services—have been flagged as urgent priorities due to the intersection of capital, sensitive user data, and systemic scale.

Addressing Immediate Harms and Accountability

Industry analysts point out that regulatory frameworks must immediately tackle existing technological challenges rather than solely focusing on theoretical future risks.

Sagar Vishnoi, an AI advisor and co-founder of Future Shift Labs, noted that regulatory initiatives must directly address four critical areas:

* Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: Combating rampant fraud, targeted harassment, and election manipulation fueled by manipulated media. * Agentic AI Accountability: Establishing clear liability structures for autonomous agents capable of conducting transactions, sending communications, and accessing private data on user behalf. * Child Safety: Mitigating severe mental health impacts stemming from companion bots and addictive digital design patterns. * Systemic Exclusion: Preventing algorithmic bias in welfare distribution, healthcare access, credit scoring, and employment screening based on demographic markers.

Additionally, experts have called for a standardized national incident-reporting mechanism to enable the domestic ecosystem to collectively learn from technological failures and security breaches.

Protecting Small Businesses and Startups

With a vast portion of Indian enterprises deploying AI through lean teams, policymakers are being urged to ensure compliance does not stifle grassroots innovation.

Industry advocates recommend the release of accessible, multi-lingual playbooks and operational checklists. These resources would assist small businesses in navigating customer disclosures, mandatory human reviews, secure data handling, and emergency shutdown procedures without imposing prohibitive administrative burdens.

As the consultation paper prepares to open for public feedback, India's broader technology sector stands at a critical juncture, balancing the imperative for rapid innovation with the absolute requirement for safety, accountability, and public trust.