The 100 Pathways Plan: India’s Blueprint for AI at Scale
India has spent a decade exporting its digital platforms—Aadhaar, UPI, ONDCOK. The 100 Pathways initiative is an attempt to export the same trick for artificial intelligence. Launched at the recently hosted AI Summit in New Delhi this year, discussions with Google, Athropic, UNDP, and others brought out one uncomfortable truth: while AI models continue to grow bigger in size and develop week after week, the muscle to deploy them to the grassroots is low. Twelve countries are reportedly part of this collective already.
David Menezes, Director (Programs) EkStep Foundation’s People+AI initiative, says the pathways try to define an adoption story, built on the back of two very different Indian deployments.
They built MahaVISTAAR, a voice-based agricultural advisory tool in collaboration with Maharashtra’s government. It is a feature-phone AI-helpline to empower farmers by providing personalised, real-time voice-first advisories on weather, pest management, mandi prices, soil health, and government schemes in multiple regional languages, including Marathi and tribal dialects. The helpline now fields roughly 10,000 queries a day.
The lessons while creating this helpline were then taken to Ethiopia to replicate the agricultural advisory model of the African nation’s own institutional data. Similarly, on PM Modi’s request, a similar dairy assistant was launched in Gujarat, named ‘Sarlaben’, to assist animal farmers who work with Amul. This voice-assistant provides personalised, on-demand advisory in Gujarati regarding cattle health, vaccination schedules, feeding practices, and breeding.
Over time, these solutions are also time-effective. Mahavistaar took nine months for its inception, while Sarlaben was created in just three weeks. Menezes says that technology accounts for only 30 per cent of a successful deployment, with the remaining 70 per cent hinging on institutional trust, data readiness, and government backing. These systems are ready to be scaled, and AI adoption is here to stay.
