Srinagar, Feb. 25 -- When Panini reduced the chaos of spoken language into a compact, computable grammar, he proved something that still holds: intelligence is most powerful when it is expressed as structure. Nalanda took that instinct into institutions, building methods to debate, preserve, and transmit knowledge across borders. India's decision to host the India AI Impact Summit 2026 draws from the same civilisational impulse, because the next leap in technology is about systems that can learn, reason, and act at scale, and the world cannot afford a future in which only a few capitals decide how those systems are built.

Held at Bharat Mandapam last week, the Summit was the first global AI summit hosted by a Global South nation, and no ...