Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said that, in the race for artificial intelligence, India’s decisive edge lies in its people and the data they generate.

He argued that while the AI revolution carries risks for jobs and industry, India’s scale and openness give it a structural advantage, one he believes the Union Budget fails to meaningfully address.

Explaining his position in the Lok Sabha and later on X, Rahul Gandhi framed AI not as a distant technology debate but as an economic and strategic contest already under way. “Everybody talks about AI, but talking about AI is like talking about the internal combustion engine without talking about petrol,” he said. “The petrol for AI is data.”

He stated the formulation for emphasis: “If you have AI and you don’t have data, you have nothing.”

In a detailed post, he wrote, “Our IT and services sector, a shining star of our economy, is at risk, and thousands of software engineers and professionals will lose their livelihoods if we do not prepare for the storm that is coming. Data is the petrol which fuels the AI engine. As I said in parliament, India’s greatest asset is our brilliant people - and the enormous data we create.”

He linked that claim to India’s demographic scale. With a population of about 1.4 billion, he described Indians as “brilliant, energetic, dynamic” and capable of competing globally. In the 21st century, he argued, people do more than produce goods and services, every digital interaction produces data, and that data has become a core economic resource.

According to the Congress leader, only two countries possess data pools of comparable magnitude — India and China — because of their population size.

But he contended that India holds an edge in the nature of its data. “We allow more freedom. We allow our people to do more dynamic things too. We have in fact more interesting data.” That diversity and openness, he suggested, can translate into stronger AI systems if the country retains control over how its data is used.

His remarks come days before a government-hosted AI summit.

Rahul Gandhi said the event should have been “an opportunity for India to assert leadership - to demonstrate how a country of 1.4 billion people can use our data to shape the global AI future ON OUR OWN TERMS.”

Instead, he accused the government of compromising India’s leverage in digital trade negotiations. “Instead, a helpless PM Modi, has surrendered to the US ‘chokehold’ in the trade deal. Under the pretext of ‘clearing barriers to digital trade’, every move to use our data for our own benefit will be opposed.”

He argued that foreign technology companies already dominate India’s data ecosystem.

“Already, large foreign companies enjoy a near monopoly on our data through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, Amazon, Android, etc. With this deal, India will struggle to⁠⁠ safely store the data of 1.5 billion Indians in India, get transparency in their source codes and algorithms, and tax the profits they make using our data

It’s a shame that our PM has been pressured to hand over India’s prime resource to a foreign power”, he added.