Gautam Adani Launches Rs 100-Crore Initiative to Preserve India's Civilisational Heritage in the AI Era

Business magnate Gautam Adani has announced a Rs 100-crore initiative aimed at rejuvenating India's educational framework and safeguarding its civilisational heritage. The declaration was made during the first-ever Adani Global Indology Conclave, hosted at Adani Corporate House (ACH) in Ahmedabad, in partnership with the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) division of the Ministry of Education.

The conclave assembled specialists in Indology, technology, and cultural studies from across India and international locations. Addressing the gathering, which included Jagadguru Shankaracharya Shri Avimukteshwarananda Saraswati ji, Gautam Adani emphasized that exploring India's knowledge traditions represents a national imperative, beyond mere academic interest.

He observed that India's historical resilience stemmed from its civilisational confidence. "When a civilisation knows who it is, its economy knows where it must go," he stated, underscoring how cultural identity supports economic development.

Gautam Adani shared personal recollections from his upbringing in Banaskantha in northern Gujarat, where his mother shared the narratives of Ramayana and Mahabharata with him. He characterized these narratives as transformative teachings rather than simple tales. "These stories were not folklore but formative lessons, introducing me to devotion, duty, and the essence of dharma."

While discussing the decline of India's ancient educational systems, he referenced the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila, the dismantling of Indian education under Macaulay, and the removal of manuscripts during colonial rule.

Adani remarked that contemporary threats are more subtle yet equally serious, with artificial intelligence emerging as a new custodian of cultural memory. "The new invaders are not armies but algorithms," he noted. AI systems predominantly trained on Western data risk oversimplifying nuanced Indic concepts such as dharma, shraddha, and purusarth.

Adani identified three significant risks AI poses to India's civilisational heritage: manuscript invisibility, cultural compression, and foreign interpretation that misunderstands Indian traditions.

To address these challenges, Adani proposed a five-point strategy: Bharat Knowledge Graph, a digital repository connecting texts, thinkers and ideas to ensure AI learns authentically from Indian sources; India-centric Indology corpus, a benchmark for testing AI comprehension of Indian philosophies; Strengthening human loop through scholar involvement to contextualize and correct AI outputs; Investing in human guardians by establishing Indology-AI academic positions and developing scholar-technologists proficient in Sanskrit and programming; and transforming every college into a new Nalanda, representing the evolution of campuses into centers where ancient wisdom intersects with modern innovation.

As part of this vision, Adani announced a founding contribution of Rs 100 crore to support the Bharat knowledge graph and educate scholars to protect India's intellectual legacy.

"Only Bharat will define Bharat," he concluded. He emphasized the critical need to shape AI and education around India's own knowledge systems so future generations receive authentic understanding about concepts like dharma.

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