Why did We Develop India's First AI Diffusion Report on Uttar Pradesh

Abhivardhan
23 hours ago
7 min read

I come from Uttar Pradesh, a huge state which has a very mixed history. Many people who don’t belong to my state still think the state has a very confused history, and I get their dilemma.

However, do you know that Uttar Pradesh has had quite a good concentration of intellectual and scientific institutions? Did anyone know that the Founding Director of Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, had her studies and literary contributions developed in the same heartland state? Did anyone tell that Verghese Kurian, the father of White Revolution, had studied in Uttar Pradesh?

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Dr Shobhit Mathur, Vice-Chancellor of Rishihood University had once pointed out in a post how “Prof. Meghnad, the famous astrophysicist, left University of Allahabad in 1938, the university offered the position of Head of Physics to none other than Erwin Schrödinger.”

If Hitler hadn’t continued the war, or say the circumstances of World War II hadn’t occurred the way history knows - Prayagraj might have had the legacy of a great scientific pioneer in UP. And since the first Prime Minister of India and even former Prime Minister Vajpayee had a fervent interest in promoting intellectual and scientific institutions in Lucknow, and Allahabad - it would have empowered my state a lot.

This is not to promote a sense of golden age syndrome to worship a place as “picture-perfect”. I can point out endless urban governance and civic sense which can eerily happen in Koramangala, Versova, Vasant Kunj, Jubilee Hills / Ladkikapul or any other part of the Tier-1 cities in India. I can also point out how institutional corruption exists at both micro and macro levels across the nation.

But finger-pointing wasn’t the intention of this post, so let’s understand why I decided in August 2025 to start working on a community-led report, UP.AIACT.IN.

Infrastructure Debates Became Reactive and not Action-Centric

I keep hearing a lot of noise across platforms, and communities about this infrastructure option, and that policy measure from lawyers, engineers, IT professionals, journalists, content creators and while some of the criticisms usually make sense, many Indians usually take a controversially parasitic tone to address policy and infrastructure issues.

For example, the Missing Link tunnel faced serious issues due to rains in Mumbai, and people started hounding at the civil engineers who literally went against usual natural problems to build the tunnel. Kuldeep’s post literally resonated with me because he pointed out how people sometimes get too entitled and do never acknowledge that miracles happen.

I would therefore say something about Uttar Pradesh which many people might not agree with: the existence of small yet resilient intellectual, scientific and technical ecosystems in my state is no less than a miracle.

It is a miracle especially when the economic history of Central India shows how the Freight Equalisation Policy of the Central Government favoured other states in the country while disenfranchising Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur and Calcutta.

The Union Government in the past 40 years focused on investing more in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai, which is welcomed. These cities enable India’s manufacturing and IT powerhouses and that was the right step. However, Mumbai, Gujarat and even parts of UP which have necessary connectivity needed infrastructure push, and I am very happy to see infrastructure developments around Metro and the New Airport in the NAINA region in Bombay.

Even in the case of UP, the focus shifted from Noida to the rest of UP and many development projects in Lucknow-Unnao area are happening at a fast pace. Even in Prayagraj, some developments are visible. It is not enough and the constituents should definitely ask for more, because Prayagraj houses some of the most important institutions of the country and the UP Government, such as the Comptroller and Auditor General’s state office, the Allahabad High Court, NIT Allahabad, IIIT-A, and many other such institutions. If local ecosystems are empowered with some creative interventions instead of stopgap arrangements, Lucknow and Prayagraj can do wonders.

Nevertheless, despite the infra push, improvement in the law and order of the state, Uttar Pradesh remains in a unique situation. Look at this tweet/post by Tushar Gupta - on how the State Government in the past 9 years has maintained tight fiscal balance.

In fact, I would recommend you to read this substack article written by Tushar on UP fiscal data (sourced from the C&AG office).

So, why this report?

The first reason was to show signs to attempt a miracle in industry policymaking and execution. Why?

The problem with certain Indian states, like Uttar Pradesh, which are British-era legacy states with older scientific and intellectual ecosystems - that some of their institutions still survive, and there might exist options to creatively adopt some industry policy measures based on legacy knowledge, and the mistakes and aftermath of industry dynamics which other prosperous states haven’t corrected.

For instance, everyone fathoms over the Bengaluru model, but totally forgets that many Kannadigas in North and Western Karnataka still remain devoid to even avail those infra avenues which say a Hosur, a Mysore or a Coimbatore have. There exists lack of long-term planning as well. Even parts of Maharashtra beyond Mumbai, Goa and Pune need creative visions and interventions.

So - to sum up - the UP.AIACT.IN Report 2026 comprises of 10 Playbooks covering 10 sectors, where each of the 77 recommendations is designed with a 24-month outlook (they are not perfect, but they have been vetted after rigorous consultations with the contributing authors of the report for weeks and months).

One can therefore put a strawman over me and say - “Why should we then read this report? There is zero guarantee anything shall happen.”Precisely - that’s the whole point. In real life, unlike what think tanks try to show - implementation takes a long time.

However, alignment and recalibration of policy choices, and the groupthink behind making and executing measures can be improved.

This is why our report avoided recommendations in certain sectors, say Water Governance, and even Expressways, in context of Artificial Intelligence, because we never found any AI-related subject-matter to discuss and therefore recommend; and that we didn’t wish to distort the focus of the recommendations in the Report.

The second reason behind creating this report was more like owing something to the state.

Since I hail from Awadh, I felt a sense of responsibility towards the state in some way and wished to create a report which truly encapsulates our potential and problems. A good number of contributing authors in the report (almost like 20%) are from Uttar Pradesh / Lucknow in some way. However, most of the stakeholders who participated in the report are from various parts of the nation.

The third reason was rather obvious: the potential of Artificial Intelligence. As AI hype grifting has been happening at insane levels everywhere, from India’s IT capital to Seattle to Beijing to even Europe and Japan - the potential of AI lies in the data aggregation and feedback looping economy. It doesn’t mean that LLMs, or agents will assuredly give you accurate outputs in a very ideal way. In fact, Alex Karp’s shoutout to embrace Open Models in a rather panicked way few days ago.

If Intellectual Property Rights, especially trade secrets and data protection rights are protected or maintained, the AI talent, general specialists and even domain specialists can do wonders and create so many IPs, like patents around AI, datasets and other ancillary intellectual properties which can enable a huge pushover for more aligned scientific discoveries, and industrial feats.

This is why Uttar Pradesh, and even Madhya Pradesh as people have a huge AI opportunity ahead. Sadly, major AI labs did bad faith marketing (you can watch this podcast I did with Kushal Mehra which gladly went viral) and created more perception fears for largely pushing their upcoming IPOs.

And while transformers are not a sustainable AI technology, from the perspectives of maths and resources, LLMs still exhibit neurosymbolic features. This means that open models can be deployed (provided some resource issues are addressed) and very specialised, piecemeal and orchestrated use of GenAI / LLMs can bring value to the Uttar Pradesh economy too.

However, we cannot adopt the Peter Thiel / Elon Musk playbook, nor we can copy the Bengaluru playbook because the Bengaluru IT ecosystem has extraordinary advantages (which might or might not be subversive or monopolistic), in terms of how talents collaborate, how funding patterns are unevenly tilted and how the State Government incentivises.

This is also why our Report does not claim that LLMs are godly, or AGI is coming.

Our Report through our Sectoral Recommendations, does not intend to recommend things which are ballooned. A lot of our recommendations were developed in a certain way to address ecosystem issues, beyond the usual cliches that people or even intellectuals may assume.

Again, this report is not perfect - and attempting to give near to precisely applicable recommendations for Uttar Pradesh is a doubled-edge sword, for sure.

Why? Uttar Pradesh is such a big state that like Karnataka and Maharashtra, no government agency can control network effects in its entirety. The government’s role is a rather unique question.

Hence, while some of the ideas recommended might not seem to be executable largely due to government capacity issues or bottlenecks associated with government departments’ approval systems - the recommendations are designed to ensure they remain evergreen and maybe a plug-and-play approach could be applied to implement some of the recommendations if they remain evergreen or valuable.

Overview of the Report

India's first AI Industry Diffusion Report on Central India and Uttar Pradesh, co-developed by the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law, is now public!You can access the complete report at up.aiact.in. The forewords of this prestigious report were authored by: