Abstract

The deployment of artificial intelligence across India's institutional landscape has reached a critical threshold. Algorithmic systems now determine welfare eligibility, assist judicial decision-making, enable predictive policing, assess corporate creditworthiness, and inform boardlevel deliberations. Yet India's regulatory response remains fundamentally fragmented and non-binding. The MeitY India AI Governance Guidelines of November 2025, the RBI FREEAI Framework of August 2025, and the SEBI Consultation Paper of June 2025 represent meaningful policy advances but do not establish legally enforceable obligations in either the government or corporate domain. This article argues that India's regulatory gap is systemic rather than sectoral. The same challenges of algorithmic opacity, accountability deficit, and fragmented liability arise whether AI is deployed by a corporation making credit decisions or a government agency determining welfare eligibility. Critically, the most consequential AI governance failures currently occurring in India are in bureaucracies rather than boardrooms: documented cases of Aadhaar linked welfare exclusion , the unregulated deployment of facial recognition surveillance without statutory basis or proportionality review, and AIassisted judicial tools operating without transparency safeguards illustrate the urgency of a governance response that extends beyond the corporate sector. Through doctrinal and comparative analysis drawing on the European Union, China, and the United States, this article proposes a unified statutory framework for India addressing AI governance across both public and private institutional domains. The framework integrates AI specific accountability obligations for government and corporate deployers alike, a risk-based classification system calibrated to India's constitutional commitments, enforceable redress mechanisms, and a coordinated institutional architecture anchored in statute rather than policy.

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