India digital governance 2026: Time for a clearer compass

Even as connectivity expands and digitisation accelerates, public institutions and policy instruments will continue to influence—and be influenced by—shifts across society, politics, geostrategy, trade, and technology.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, one-third of humanity remains offline. The digital divide, amplified further in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is particularly stark across geography, gender, and generation.

India did, admittedly, witness several significant and forward-looking developments in 2025. These included the notification of rules under both the Telecommunications Act, 2023, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, alongside detailed recommendations on India’s AI Governance Guidelines. Yet the global policy landscape remained in flux throughout 2025, mirroring the broader turbulence in the digital ecosystem.

Inconsistencies between policy development and technological advancement continue to create a conundrum for policymakers. They must remain committed to long-term strategic goals while simultaneously responding to short-term pressures and distractions.

A Clearer Policy Compass

As we enter 2026, three broad trends are emerging despite the fog of uncertainty created by continuous churn.

Firstly, domestic policies are exerting disproportionate global influence. This is evident in areas such as tariffs, export restrictions, critical minerals, global value chains, and rising calls for technology sovereignty—despite the undeniable reality that technology, by its nature, transcends borders.

Secondly, AI has become the defining theme of the moment, attracting unprecedented investment, inflating valuations, and prompting closer scrutiny from political leadership, civil society, and academia. The “AI-fication” of everything, everywhere—almost without exception—has become a hallmark of the year.

Thirdly, even as the once-siloed worlds of telecommunications, information technology, and broadcasting converge rapidly, legacy governance systems and processes continue to operate in isolation, generating unnecessary gaps, overlaps, and friction.

Technology now extends far beyond digital. Generative AI and Agentic AI, the buzzwords of the day, are subsets within a much broader AI continuum. An integrated and interoperable governance framework is therefore essential as India moves toward the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, underpinned by deep digital empowerment.

As India heads into 2026, questions around institutional design, regulatory clarity, and future-ready governance will define its digital transformation path.

A 3C Lens on Digital Governance

In this context, the 3C framework—Carriage, Content, and Conduct—articulated in Governing Digital India: A Report on Institutions and Instruments by the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, urges policymakers to focus on three foundational streams.

Carriage denotes connectivity, both wired and wireless. The World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025 underscores connectivity as a prerequisite for “Strengthening AI Foundations”. Much has changed since the first National Telecom Policy in 1994. What was once a luxury good—the mobile phone—is now a mass productivity tool. India leads the world in monthly data consumption with the most affordable data tariffs globally. Yet thousands of villages remain unconnected, even though NTP 1994 had set it as a target for 2027. The growing corpus of the Digital Bharat Nidhi—now around Rs 80,000 crore—indicates that funding is no longer the primary constraint.

Content refers to what flows over this connectivity. In the era of voice telephony, it was basically individuals creating and sharing their own content. With digitisation, analogue voice was converted into digital signals, enabling faster, more reliable transmission. As data networks matured, enterprises could exchange information across distances. The arrival of the World Wide Web on top of the internet enabled voice, data, and video to travel over the same infrastructure—ushering in an era where video consumption now dominates network usage.

Conduct concerns the behaviour of stakeholders. This includes cybersecurity, data protection, competition, and sustainability. Cybersecurity has become central to national security and to the protection of critical infrastructure across financial services, healthcare, energy, and transport. Data protection empowers individuals through informed consent and redressal mechanisms, safeguarding privacy—a fundamental right—while still enabling governments and businesses to use personal data to deliver improved services and innovative offerings.

Calm, Compassion, and Coherence

Given India’s iterative, deliberative, and consultative policy-making traditions—the bedrock of its democracy—policymakers would do well to prioritise long-term structural and systemic reform rather than rushing out a patchwork of discrete and sometimes conflicting policies. Three key questions merit reflection.

One, does the country need a Digital India strategy that builds on the existing programme but extends far beyond it? The second concerns institutional architecture. Instead of continuing with three separate ministries, should activities relating to carriage and conduct be consolidated into two verticals—or integrated into a single coherent structure suited to converged digital governance?

The third concerns regulatory clarity. How, and by whom, should the various dimensions of conduct—spanning safety, competition, trust and accountability—be regulated to ensure consistency, coherence and legal certainty?

As India approaches 2026, the answers to these questions will determine whether its digital governance evolves with calm, compassion, and clarity—or remains constrained by legacy pathways ill-suited to the demands of a rapidly transforming digital future.

The author is a public policy professional and currently Senior Policy Advisor at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress.
(The views are personal and do not reflect the organisations that he works for.)