Responsible AI Impact Lab

Over the years, as AI adoption has accelerated across health, education, agriculture, and public service delivery, it has become clear that technology alone cannot drive meaningful impact. Social impact organisations need the frameworks, capacities, and safeguards to ensure AI applications serve people—especially in low-resource and high-stakes environments.

Our capacity-building initiatives respond to this need. They bring together research, practice, and long-term mentorship to help organisations design AI systems that are grounded in responsible AI principles, ethics, context, and care.

In its essence, our Responsible AI (RAI) work has grown from the question: How can India’s social impact ecosystem adopt AI in ways that are effective, equitable, and safe?

India’s 3.1M+ social impact organisations are uniquely positioned to shape how AI is used for public good. They work closely with communities, understand contextual realities, and design interventions that address urgent development needs.

With rapid AI adoption, these organisations face two simultaneous pressures:

1. Opportunity: AI can improve scale, efficiency, and personalisation in programmes across health, education, agriculture, and governance.
2. Risk: Without appropriate guardrails, AI interventions may reinforce inequities, compromise privacy, or cause real-world harm.

Yet most organisations lack internal policies, technical guidance, or frameworks for responsible deployment. Existing global RAI principles often remain too abstract or context-agnostic to help them translate values into action.

Our capacity-building work seeks to fill this gap. Grounded in India’s socio-technical realities, our approach is designed to help organisations build sustainable, long-term capability—not one-off compliance.

AI Ethics in the Global South: Capacity-Strengthening and Learning

We were part of a global expert network supporting the Gates Foundation’s Global Grand Challenges 2023 program on Catalysing Equitable AI Use. The initiative funded 50 projects across Africa, Asia, and South America to explore how GenAI can advance solutions in maternal health, sexual health, gender-based violence, agriculture, education, and more.

In partnership with the Global Center on AI Governance (South Africa) and the Institute for Technology and Society (Brazil), we supported grantees in strengthening the ethical, gender-transformative, and context-responsive dimensions of their GenAI interventions.

The Responsible AI Fellowship

Launched in 2024, the Responsible AI Fellowship is India’s first capacity-building program dedicated to helping social impact organisations build AI interventions that are ethical, context-aware, and community-safe.

The Fellowship equips organisations with the knowledge frameworks, tools, and support systems required to develop AI solutions that are equitable and safe. It blends deep technical literacy with an understanding of governance, design ethics, and field-level realities.

The inaugural Fellowship had a cohort of 14 of India’s leading social impact organisations as Fellows and nine leading global industry experts as mentors.

The Practice Playbook on Responsible AI

Published in 2025, The Practice Playbook on Responsible AI is a comprehensive guide for social impact organisations designing or deploying AI interventions in India.

Co-created with the Fellow organisations and expert mentors from the inaugural RAI Fellowship, the Playbook blends research, lived practice, and implementation insights from real-world pilots.

Capacity-building Program for Government officials

Developed in partnership with CeRAI, IIT-M with the support of Google and IndiaAI, this initiative aims to equip government officials with technical, operational and governance skills required to deploy AI effectively in public institutions. With AI increasingly influencing sectors such as education, service delivery and digital governance, the program seeks to address the growing need for AI awareness, literacy and robust decision-making frameworks within government.

Through case studies, workshops and hands-on sessions, participants will also assess their departments’ current AI readiness and identify pathways to adopt or improve AI-based tools in their respective domains.

Our Responsible AI work continues to evolve as India’s socio-technical landscape changes. In the coming years, we aim to:

• Expand the Fellowship to support more organisations across India
• Deepen our research on AI adoption in social sector environments
• Build long-term infrastructure—tools, communities of practice, and policy insights—that strengthen RAI implementation
• Partner with more ecosystem actors to advance safe, inclusive AI for public good

Our goal is to ensure that AI in India is designed with care, deployed with accountability, and grounded in the realities of the people it seeks to serve.