In this episode of Interpreting India, Konark Bhandari, speaks with Edward Fishman, author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare, on economic statecraft, how the U.S. built its playbook for economic warfare over time, and what the lessons are for India as it looks to build its own economic resilience. This episode explores: • What makes something a genuine choke point, and is there a playbook that other countries can actually replicate? • Why were China's rare earth export controls and Iran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz among the most consequential acts of economic warfare in recent months? • Why does the U.S. tend to ratchet up export controls and sanctions incrementally, and what are the consequences of that approach? • What options does India have in an era of geo-economic fragmentation, and where does it stand in the U.S.-China technology competition?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, speaks with Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog and Chief Architect of the NITI Frontier Tech Hub. With nearly three decades across Intel, NASSCOM, and now NITI Aayog, Debjani brings a perspective that is both deeply practical and genuinely optimistic. She co-chaired the working group on AI for Economic Growth and Social Good at the India AI Impact Summit, and in this conversation she reflects on what the summit delivered, what India's AI journey needs to get right, and why the human being has to stay at the center of all of it.

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, Associate Fellow at Carnegie India, speaks with Professor Balaraman Ravindran, Head of the Department of Data Science and AI at IIT Madras, and Co-Chair of the Safe and Trusted AI Working Group at the India AI Impact Summit. Since the summit, Professor Ravindran has also been appointed to the UN's Independent International Scientific Panel on AI. There is a narrative that has taken hold since the summit, that India moved away from safety and left frontier risks behind. This conversation sets the record straight. This episode explores: What did the Safe and Trusted AI Working Group actually deliver, and what are the Trusted AI Commons? and the AI governance guidance note designed to do? Was the India AI Impact Summit really less focused on safety, or did the conversation simply evolve when it moved to the Global South? How quickly is the frontier risk landscape changing, and are the frameworks we are building keeping pace? What does the growing concentration of the most capable AI models in the hands of two countries mean for a country like India?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Charukeshi Bhatt speaks with Pooja Bhatt, associate professor, Jindal School of International Affairs, O.P. Jindal University, on a piece of infrastructure that is easy to overlook and very difficult to protect: subsea cables. Stretching over 1.5 million kilometres across ocean floors and carrying nearly 99% of global data traffic, these cables underpin everything from financial systems and cloud infrastructure to the everyday digital services that billions of people rely on. For India, a fast-growing digital economy with expanding data center ambitions, getting this right is not optional. Why subsea cables remain far superior to satellites for global data transfer, and what India's current footprint in the global cable network actually looks like? How do cable consortia work in practice, and what are the tensions that arise when private companies and sovereign governments have very different priorities? How real is the threat from China's rapidly expanding footprint in the global cable network, and what does the debate around trusted networks mean in practice? What has the Quad delivered on cable connectivity and resilience, and what should India's next steps be domestically and regionally?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Adarsh Ranjan, research analyst at Carnegie India, speaks with Jaspreet Bindra, founder of AI&Beyond and Tech Whisperer Limited, UK, and author of 'Winning with AI: Your Guide to AI Literacy.' Jaspreet brings a practitioner's perspective to questions that often get lost in the noise around AI: not just what is changing, but whether people, organizations, and policymakers are actually prepared for it. This episode explores: Is India's enthusiasm for AI actually translating into adoption on the ground, and which sectors are seeing real change? Is AI destroying jobs or transforming them, and what does that mean for a country whose economy was built on knowledge work and software services? What is AI literacy, why is it different from training, and why does Jaspreet think it is the most underappreciated variable in the AI policy debate? On deepfakes and copyright, are India's existing frameworks anywhere close to adequate?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh, associate fellow at Carnegie India, speaks with Saurabh Garg, secretary at the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India, who chaired the working group on democratizing AI resources at the India AI Impact Summit. The working group brought together over 30 countries and several international organizations to tackle a fundamental question: how do you make the foundational resources for AI, compute, data, models, and talent, accessible to countries that currently have very little of it? This episode explores: How did the working group build consensus across such a diverse set of countries and such different levels of AI maturity? How did India's own experience with digital public infrastructure inform the thinking behind these global initiatives? What are the next steps, and what role does India see itself playing going forward?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Tejas Bharadwaj is joined by Almudena Azcárate Ortega, senior program analyst at Secure World Foundation, for a wide-ranging conversation on how emerging technologies, particularly AI, are reshaping the landscape of space security. A space lawyer and policy scholar with deep experience in multilateral processes, Almudena brings both technical nuance and diplomatic realism to questions that most space conversations still treat as hypothetical. This episode explores: What is space security, and how is it different from space safety and why does that distinction matter more than ever in the age of AI? How is AI being used in space domain awareness, debris management, and Earth observation, and what are the limits of relying on AI for high-stakes decisions in space? What happens to accountability and liability when an AI system integrated into a satellite causes damage — either through malfunction or deliberate manipulation? Do we need new treaties to govern AI in space, or is the existing framework, built around the Outer Space Treaty, still fit for purpose?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh is joined by Raymond Ononiwu, founder and CEO of Horus Labs, for a conversation that cuts through the noise around compute, data centres, and AI infrastructure to ask a more fundamental question: who is this all actually being built for? Raymond brings the perspective of someone building AI infrastructure on the ground in Africa, and his account of what the global AI conversation is still getting wrong is both practical and pointed. This episode explores: What is compute, why has it become a strategic resource, and does every country actually need to be training frontier models? What does AI infrastructure really require on the ground, and why is building it in the Global South a fundamentally different challenge from building it in Shenzhen? If you are a country in sub-Saharan Africa trying to build an AI strategy, what should you invest in and what should you ignore entirely? Are the global conversations happening around AI, including at the India AI Impact Summit, actually reflecting what builders on the ground need?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Vrinda Sahai is joined by Nicolas Köhler-Suzuki, Advisor for Trade and Economic Security at the Jacques Delors Institute, for a detailed conversation on the India-EU Free Trade Agreement. After decades of slow-moving negotiations, both sides have arrived at what is shaping up to be the most ambitious trade deal India has ever signed. Nicolas unpacks what is in the agreement, what is missing, and what its success will depend on in the years ahead. What finally brought India and the EU to the table after years of negotiations going nowhere, and why the timing matters as much as the deal itself? How does this agreement compare to India's previous trade deals and to the EU's agreements with other partners, and where are the clearest gaps? How significant are the non-tariff barriers including the EU's regulatory standards? What do the mobility provisions mean for Indian IT professionals, and how realistic are the promises given the political climate across EU member states?

In this episode of Interpreting India, Nidhi Singh is joined by Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and one of the very few people to have attended all four global AI summits, from Bletchley Park to Delhi. The conversation traces the arc of AI summit diplomacy, what has been accomplished, where the gaps remain, and what the process reveals about how different parts of the world are thinking about a technology that is moving faster than any single government or institution can keep up with. How has the conversation at AI summits shifted from existential risk and frontier safety to economic opportunity and beneficial deployment, and is that a sign of progress or a loss of focus? What did India bring to the AI governance conversation that the UK, South Korea, and France could not, and how does the scale of this summit change the trajectory of the summits? With the UK and the United States stepping back from multilateral consensus, can the summit series still deliver meaningful outcomes? What should Geneva, the next summit host, actually try to accomplish?