New
Delhi, 23 February 2026 : The Cyril Shroff Centre for AI, Law and
Regulation at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, in
partnership with Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, convened a high-profile panel
titled “Exploring a Regulatory Framework for Open Data” at Bharat Mandapam as
part of the India AI Impact Summit 2026.
Dr.
Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) for Thiruvananthapuram,
delivered the keynote address, framing data governance as a question of
power, sovereignty and value extraction and advocated for “structured
openness”, an approach that prioritises open data infrastructure while
deliberately building guardrails and domestic capacity to prevent inequalities
and external dependency.
The
session was moderated by Professor (Dr.) C. Raj Kumar, Founding Vice-Chancellor
and Dean, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University,
who guided the discussion on whether data sharing should move from a voluntary
practice to an institutional duty backed by statute.
Mr.
Cyril Shroff, Managing Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas,
argued for a statutory and regulatory open-data framework to overcome
government data siloing and provide the legal certainty that fosters investor
confidence, responsible innovation and market-led growth.
Mr.
Arun S. Prabhu, Partner & Co-Head (Digital | TMT Practice), Cyril Amarchand
Mangaldas, emphasised that effective open-data
governance requires the law to systematically address operational issues -
anonymisation, standardisation, purpose-limitation, while clearly defining the objectives
for data sharing.
Ms.
Rama Vedashree, former Chief Executive Officer, Data Security Council of India
(DSCI), highlighted that India’s open-data ecosystem
often lacks machine-readability, rich metadata and interoperability, and that
“open” must increasingly mean usable for AI and other advanced applications.
From
the private sector, Ms. Irina Ghose, Managing Director, Anthropic (India),
underlined the need for a trust continuum from data origin to end-use and
proposed concepts such as a “model context protocol” to enable contextual,
local-language and domain-specific data to be usable at scale for AI
applications.
Dr.
Sasmit Patra, Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha),
noted how a trusted, reliable data infrastructure is essential for
evidence-based policymaking and cited AI-driven crop-loss prediction as a
high-impact public-interest use case.
Ms.
Asha Jadeja Motwani, Founder, Motwani Jadeja Foundation,
synthesised the discussion and called for enforceable open-data laws,
recognition of public data as core digital infrastructure, and stronger
international alignment to advance shared global AI governance aims.
Speakers
emphasised that open data must increasingly mean usable, and that datasets
should be machine-readable, richly annotated, and provided through AI-ready
public data infrastructure (APIs, interoperability standards, and reliable,
scalable access) so they can safely power public-interest AI applications. The
session concluded that a combination of enforceable law, technical standards
and international cooperation will be central to a workable open-data regime
suitable for the AI age.
The
India AI Impact Summit 2026 brought together global leaders from government,
industry, and civil society at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, to deliberate on collective
principles and actionable roadmaps for AI governance and ecosystem development.