India’s digital policy conversation has revolved around data sovereignty with focus on where the data resides and who controls it. But as artificial intelligence, and particularly Large Language Models, become the engines that interpret, reason, and generate meaning from that data, the debate must move beyond storage to cognition. In today’s AI-driven world, sovereignty is no longer just about owning the bytes; it’s about owning the brains that make sense of them.India could soon be on the verge of becoming a data-rich but cognition-poor nation, collecting petabytes of information but outsourcing its interpretation to foreign models. These global LLMs, trained primarily on Western data and assumptions, often miss the nuances of Indian life. For instance, “mugging” refers to assault in the West, and in local parlance it is students cramming for examination, or “tuition” is university fees in the West and it means ”private coaching” in India.
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