Cyril Shroff Centre for AI, Law and Regulation, JGU convenes panel at India AI Impact Summit

The Cyril Shroff Centre for AI, Law and Regulation at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University (JGU), in partnership with Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas (CAM), convened a panel titled 'Exploring a Regulatory Framework for Open Data' at Bharat Mandapam as part of the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

The panel comprised Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha, Dr Shashi Tharoor, Managing Partner, CAM, Cyril Shroff, Partner & Co-Head, Digital & Technology, Media, and Telecom practice, CAM, Arun S Prabhu, former CEO, Data Security Council of India, Rama Vedashree, Managing Director, Anthropic India, Irina Ghose, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, Dr Sasmit Patra, and Founder, Motwani Jadeja Foundation, Asha Jadeja Motwani.

The panel was moderated by Founding Vice-Chancellor, JGU, and Dean, Jindal Global Law School, Prof (Dr) C Raj Kumar who guided the discussion on data sharing.

Dr Shashi Tharoor delivered the keynote address on framing data governance as a question of power, sovereignty and value extraction. While advocating for 'structured openness', he deliberated on building guardrails and domestic capacity to prevent inequalities and external dependency. 

Cyril Shroff argued for a statutory and regulatory open-data framework to overcome government data siloing. Shroff suggested that this would provide legal certainty that fosters investor confidence, responsible innovation and market-led growth.

Arun S Prabhu emphasised that effective open-data governance required the law to systematically address operational issues such as anonymisation, standardisation, purpose-limitation, while also creating defined objectives for data sharing.

Rama Vedashree highlighted that India’s open-data ecosystem often lacks machine-readability, metadata and interoperability.

While underling the need for a trust continuum from data origin to end-use and proposed concepts such as a 'model context protocol', Irina Ghose explained how they would enable contextual, local-language and domain-specific data to be usable at scale for AI applications.

Dr Sasmit Patra noted how AI-driven crop-loss prediction could be used as reliable data infrastructure for evidence-based policymaking.

Asha Jadeja Motwani called for enforceable open-data laws, recognition of public data as core digital infrastructure, and stronger international alignment to advance shared global AI governance aims.

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