On February 19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood at Bharat Mandapam before French President Emmanuel Macron, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, many world leaders and hundreds of leading technology executives and engineers. The occasion was the India AI Impact Summit — the first global convening of its kind held in the Global South. He spoke like a statesman: “We believe AI can benefit only when it can be shared. We should make a resolve to develop AI as a global common good. We must democratise AI. It must become a tool for inclusion and empowerment, particularly for the Global South.”

In that single statement, Modi laid down a challenge to the prevailing architecture of the AI economy — dominated by a handful of Big Tech companies, driven by proprietary models, closed datasets, and winner-take-all compute markets. What he proposed was a fundamental reframing: AI not as a strategic asset to be hoarded, but as a commons to be collectively stewarded.
To understand why this matters — and why it might actually work — one must turn not just to geopolitics, but to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom. I had argued in a paper in November 2023 at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington, US why cyberspace was a global commons. Today, AI offers a more vivid argument in that direction.

For decades, conventional wisdom held that shared resources inevitably collapse. Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” — the idea that self-interest will deplete any shared resource — was treated as economic gospel. Ostrom demolished this orthodoxy. Through field research on Swiss mountain pastures and Maine lobster fisheries, she demonstrated that communities can manage shared resources sustainably, without privatisation or state control, provided certain institutional conditions are met: Clearly defined boundaries, rules adapted to local conditions, collective decision-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and dispute resolution mechanisms.

Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/ai-should-be-global-commons-pm-modis-manav-can-lead-the-way-10540932/lite/