The world stands at a critical technological crossroads where the exponential growth of computing power meets the rising threat of quantum vulnerability. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, held at the sprawling Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, a significant shift in national digital strategy emerged. NITI Aayog, the government’s premier policy think tank, has officially positioned Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) not merely as a cybersecurity update, but as a foundational “shield” for India’s world-renowned Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
As India continues to export its “India Stack” philosophy – encompassing Aadhaar, UPI, and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – the summit highlighted that the integrity of these systems must be future-proofed against the “Q-Day” threat. The central argument presented is that for DPI to remain a global gold standard for financial inclusion and governance, it must survive the eventual arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
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The discussions at the summit underscored a sobering reality: the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” (HNDL) strategy. Adversaries are currently intercepting and storing encrypted data with the intent to decrypt it once quantum hardware matures. For a nation like India, which handles the personal and financial data of over 1.4 billion citizens through its DPI, this is an existential risk.
NITI Aayog’s strategy involves transitioning the entire DPI ecosystem toward “cryptographic agility.” This approach ensures that the underlying security protocols of the national identity and payment systems are not hard-coded but are modular. By making these systems “PQC-ready,” the government can swap out traditional RSA or Elliptic Curve algorithms for lattice-based or hash-based PQC algorithms without needing to rebuild the entire infrastructure from scratch. This agility is what transforms a standard digital ledger into a “shielded” sovereign asset.
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A key highlight of the summit was the focus on a phased, hybrid implementation. Recognizing that a total overnight migration to PQC is logistically impossible, the proposed roadmap advocates for a dual-layer encryption model. In this setup, data is protected by both current classical encryption and emerging PQC standards.
This “belt-and-suspenders” approach serves two purposes. First, it maintains compliance with existing global standards while providing an immediate defense against future quantum attacks. Second, it allows India’s burgeoning AI ecosystem, fueled by the $1.2 billion IndiaAI Mission, to operate securely. As AI agents increasingly manage DPI transactions, ensuring that the communication channels between these agents and the core infrastructure are quantum-safe becomes the primary objective of the new security framework.
Perhaps the most impactful takeaway from the India AI Impact Summit 2026 is the ambition to democratise quantum-safe DPI. NITI Aayog emphasized that PQC should not be a luxury for the Global North. By integrating PQC into the open-source building blocks of the India Stack, the government intends to provide a “secure-by-design” template for other developing nations.
Through the “Seven Chakras” of the summit, particularly the working groups on Safe & Trusted AI, India is crafting a narrative where technological sovereignty is tied to security resilience. The goal is to ensure that as the world transitions to an AI-driven economy, the digital foundations, be it for health records (ABDM) or direct benefit transfers, remain impenetrable. By embedding PQC as a core component of the DPI shield, India is ensuring that its digital revolution is not just fast and inclusive, but permanent.
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