The Situation Room: How India’s energy and data dependencies are reshaping strategic PR

Priyanka Chaturvedi, a former Member of Parliament and former member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT, strongly supports India's digital sovereignty, saying, "We cannot have our digital infrastructure sitting outside the country."

That argument about owning the technology stack has been building in Indian policy circles for a while. At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi in February, Chaturvedi had stated that "India must build its own AI models. Our models should be India-specific and provide solutions for India. We should encourage Indian entrepreneurs to find India-based, India-first solutions. That will be more powerful."

Along with data sovereignty, the next pillar of 'Building India for the Future' is energy sufficiency. 

Hisham Mondol, chief advisor, India, Environmental Defence Fund, points out that every disruption in the Gulf does more to move corporate thinking on energy than a decade of climate advocacy managed.

He argues that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz has brought home the realisation that the energy transition is not just a climate agenda. It is as much about national security, economic stability, livelihoods protection and risk management — for companies and for countries

The shift matters because it changes who listens. A sustainability pitch reaches the sustainability team. A risk pitch reaches the board. Mundol's point is that sustainable choices are now simply the wiser choices for an enterprise — whether or not anyone in the room cares about the environment.

He is equally direct about where India sits in the global picture. America has slowed on climate action. China has not. In a few years, he argues, China will own the green economy, and that is a threat to India as much as an opportunity. His prescription is not to chase China everywhere, but to pick fights India can win: three-wheelers and scooters rather than head-on competition on premium EVs.

Jaivir Singh: vice chairman, PwC India Foundation, and advisor to the chairman, PwC India, adopts the same risk lens from the private-sector side. Ten years ago, he says, a CFO would have shown you the door for linking climate to supply chain. Today it is priced into insurance premiums.

He applies the same sequencing logic to AI. PwC's view, he says, is that AI can be deployed successfully to empower India's manufacturing and other MSMEs — but only once the groundwork exists. Digitisation is the unglamorous first step, and most MSMEs have not taken it, in a sector contributing close to 40% of the economy on formal numbers. Without that base infrastructure, and without data sovereignty, a homegrown LLM delivers very little to the businesses that need it most.

 Singh also praised India's recent critical minerals push — the National Critical Mineral Mission, launched last year, set out a framework for self-reliance in the sector — but argued in favour of stronger, sustained, top-down engagement with resource regions like Africa.