Equitable agency: The case for an AI agent for every Indian
Her name is Lakshmi. She lives in a small village in the Krishna delta, Andhra Pradesh, where the fields flood in September and the nearest bank branch is a one-hour bus ride away. She wants to buy a buffalo, not as an aspiration, but as a business plan.
A government scheme could fund it. But she cannot read or fill a form and has no one to help her navigate the paperwork.The bank exists. The scheme exists.
The money exists. The gap is not financial. It’s procedural.
And procedural complexity, invisible to those of us who navigate it daily, is one of the most efficient destroyers of wealth in India.This is the problem at the heart of a white paper I co-authored with colleagues from MIT, IIT Kanpur, IISc and other institutions for the India AI Impact Summit, titled ‘Doot: The AI Agent for Every Indian Citizen.’ It outlines the architecture for an AI agent designed to work for every Indian citizen. Lakshmi talks to the Doot app on her smartphone about her need for a loan. Her personal AI agent finds the right scheme, verifies her identity through Aadhaar KYC, retrieves her income and eligibility certificate documents from DigiLocker and initiates the loan through the bank’s systems automatically, without requiring her to understand and fill out forms by hand, and without a middleman.
India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) stack is formidable: Aadhaar authenticates a billion identities and UPI moves ₹250 trillion annually in payments. What is missing is the agentic layer that converts citizen intent into government process and banking workflow. With sovereign large language models like Sarvam now capable of nuanced, culturally grounded conversation across India’s major languages, the linguistic barriers that kept
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