अरमानों की कोई हद नहीं

हज़ारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले 

बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान, लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले

— मिर्ज़ा ग़ालिब

पहला मिसरा —

"हज़ारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले"

मेरे मन में हज़ारों चाहतें हैं — और हर चाहत इतनी गहरी है, इतनी तीव्र है, कि उसके लिए जान दे दूँ। "दम निकले" यानी — साँस निकल जाए। प्राण निकल जाएँ। यानी हर एक ख्वाहिश जानलेवा हद तक ज़रूरी है।

दूसरा मिसरा —

"बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान, लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले"

और जब वो चाहतें पूरी हुईं — तो हुईं भी बहुत। ज़िंदगी ने दिया भी। लेकिन फिर भी — कम लगा। तृप्ति नहीं आई। मन और माँगता रहा।

ग़ालिब यहाँ इंसानी मन की एक सच्चाई कह रहे हैं — कि हम जितना पाते हैं, उससे ज़्यादा चाहते हैं। पाना और चाहना — दोनों साथ चलते हैं, कभी बराबर नहीं होते।

घर का रास्ता

रात भर का मेहमान हूँ, ऐ चाँद जानता हूँ मैं 

एक उम्र से हूँ बाहर, घर का रास्ता जानता हूँ मैं

— गुलज़ार

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

Salem की आख़िरी रात - थोड़ी देर और, फिर वो रास्ता जो हमेशा याद रहता है।

Jo Tudh Bhaavai Saa-ee Bhalee Kaar: The Leadership Verse Hidden in Japji Sahib

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ, ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫ਼ਤਿਹ।

Some verses of Gurbani carry you quietly for years before you notice they have been doing the work. This is one of them. Two lines from Japji Sahib that I find myself returning to on difficult days, in difficult meetings, and in quiet evenings with my children.

The Shabad

Gurmukhi

ਜੋ ਤੁਧੁ ਭਾਵੈ ਸਾਈ ਭਲੀ ਕਾਰ ॥
ਤੂ ਸਦਾ ਸਲਾਮਤਿ ਨਿਰੰਕਾਰ ॥

Hindi

जो तुझे अच्छा लगे, वही कार्य भला है।
तू सदा सलामत है, हे निरंकार।

English Transliteration

Jo tudh bhaavai saa-ee bhalee kaar.
Too sadaa salaamat Nirankaar.

Source: Ang 3, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji. Japji Sahib, Pauri 16. Composed by Guru Nanak Dev Ji.

Understanding the Verse

Word by word: whatever pleases You, that alone is the good work. You, Formless One, are forever whole.

The word salaamat is worth pausing on. It is an Arabic-rooted word, the same root as Islam and salaam, meaning peace, wholeness, being untouched by harm. Guru Nanak Dev Ji, writing in the heart of Punjab's Hindu-Muslim interweave, deliberately reaches into both vocabularies. This is the Sikh instinct from its first breath: truth borrows whatever word speaks truest.

This tuk is the pinnacle of one of Sikhi's most difficult teachings: Bhana Manana, acceptance of the Divine Will not with gritted teeth but with the recognition that what unfolds in Hukam is already beautiful work.

Notice the breathtaking move the Guru makes. He does not say "whatever happens is fine"; that would be fatalism. He does not say "accept what you cannot change"; that would be Stoicism. He says something far more radical: whatever pleases the Formless One is the good work. The doer is the Divine. The good is defined by the Divine's pleasure. Our task is to align with that current, not to judge it.

And then, in a single closing line, he anchors the whole teaching. Too sadaa salaamat Nirankaar. You, Formless One, are forever whole. Whatever the waves on the surface, the ocean is untouched.

This verse became the spiritual steel of the Sikh tradition. When Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji walked to his martyrdom in Chandni Chowk in 1675, he walked in bhana. When Mata Gujri Ji received the news of her grandsons' bricking alive at Sirhind, she responded in bhana. This is not passivity. It is the fiercest form of agency, because it frees the soul from the tyranny of outcomes.

How This Lands in a Working Life

You walk into a meeting having prepared a careful note, a careful recommendation. The decision goes the other way. Or a posting you wanted does not come. Or a file you championed gets stuck. The mind begins its familiar loop: I should have, they should have, if only.

This verse is the circuit breaker. Jo tudh bhaavai saa-ee bhalee kaar. You did your karam with full honesty. The rest is not yours to carry. The Hukam has moved. And the One who moves it is sadaa salaamat, forever whole, forever unshaken. So why must you be?

A harder application: ambition. The verse does not ask you to kill ambition; Sikhi never does. It asks you to hold ambition with open palms. Do the work with your whole heart. But when the outcome lands, greet it with bhalee kaar. This is the secret of leaders who do not exhaust themselves. The work is theirs; the fruit is the Guru's.

Wisdom Across Traditions

Krishna's teaching to Arjuna on the battlefield in the Bhagavad Gita, Karmanye vadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachana (you have the right to action alone, never to its fruits), is a sibling of this verse. The Gita leaves the fruit undefined. Guru Nanak Dev Ji names it: the fruit pleasing to the Divine is itself bhalee kaar.

The Sufi concept of tawakkul (trust in Allah) and rida (contentment with Divine decree) maps almost exactly onto bhana. Rumi writes that the reed flute cries because it has been cut from the reed bed, yet its cry becomes music that pleases the Beloved. The cutting was bhalee kaar. That the Guru uses the Arabic-rooted salaamat to describe the Formless One is not accident; it is embrace.

A Closing Thought

Hukam is what is. Bhana is how we receive what is. A Sikh who lives in Bhana is unshakeable, not because nothing moves them, but because they have stopped quarrelling with reality.

Two lines, twenty words, one lifetime of practice.

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ, ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫ਼ਤਿਹ।

From your desk to the FM - KarSetu

There is a particular kind of satisfaction — quiet, almost private — that comes from watching something you crafted at your own desk travel all the way up and enter the public domain at the highest level. On 20th March 2026, the Hon'ble Finance Minister of India, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, released Kar Setu — the eBook and booklet on Interplay and Transition FAQs from the Income Tax Act, 1961 to the Income Tax Act, 2025.

What Kar Setu Is

India is undergoing one of the most significant legislative transitions in its fiscal history. The Income Tax Act, 1961 — a statute that governed the tax lives of every Indian for over six decades — is being replaced by the Income Tax Act, 2025. This is not a cosmetic rewrite. It is a restructuring of 536 sections, affecting over 700 field offices, tens of thousands of tax officers, and millions of taxpayers and practitioners across the country.

The question that every officer in the field, every chartered accountant advising a client, every taxpayer filing a return would inevitably ask is: What changes? What stays? What do I do differently starting April 2026?

Kar Setu was built to answer that question.

The name itself — Kar Setu, a bridge of duty — was chosen deliberately. This is not a commentary or an academic paper. It is a bridge. A structured, FAQ-based guide that maps the interplay between the old Act and the new, so that the transition is navigable rather than bewildering.

The Four Months Behind It

What the public sees today is a finished product — clean, structured, authoritative. What they don't see is the four months that preceded it.

Sixteen sub-committees were constituted to cover every major area of the Act. Each committee comprised officers who live and breathe these provisions daily — assessment, appeals, penalties, TDS, international taxation, search and seizure, and more. The coordination happened out of the Directorate of Organisation and Management Services (DOMS), CBDT, where I serve as Member Secretary to the Guidance Note Committee for the ITA 2025 implementation.

There were drafts. Many drafts. There were rounds of review where a single FAQ would be debated, reworded, cross-referenced, and debated again. There were late-night iterations where you are staring at Section 247 of the new Act and tracing its lineage back to Section 143(3) of the 1961 Act, making sure the transition guidance is precise enough that a young ITO in a mofussil town can rely on it.

This is the unglamorous work of governance. No stage, no spotlight. Just a desk, a screen, and the knowledge that if you get this wrong, the confusion will cascade across the entire tax ecosystem.

Why This Matters Beyond Tax

I have spent fifteen years in the Indian Revenue Service. I have done transfer pricing investigations, ITAT litigation, international tax advisory, and policy work. I have studied at Columbia and Harvard, advised at the UN, and consulted for the G20. But I will say this plainly: there is something uniquely grounding about building a document that will be used by an Assessing Officer in Dharwad and a Senior Partner at a Big Four firm in Mumbai on the same day, for the same purpose.

Kar Setu is a leveller. It doesn't distinguish between the officer who needs it to process a case and the practitioner who needs it to advise a client. It serves both. That is what public goods are supposed to do.

In an age where we talk endlessly about AI in governance, digital transformation, and technology-led reform, it is worth remembering that sometimes the most impactful thing a government can produce is a well-structured document that answers the right questions clearly. Not an app. Not a dashboard. A document — researched, debated, refined, and released.

The Moment

When the Finance Minister releases something you have been working on for months — something that started as a working file on your desktop, went through committee after committee, was revised at 11 PM on a Thursday, and finally emerged as a polished eBook — there is a moment. It is not dramatic. It is not cinematic. But it is deeply, quietly, satisfying.

You don't need anyone to tell you the work mattered. You know. Because you watched it travel from your desk to the hands of the person who stewards this country's fiscal policy. And now it is in the public domain, serving the people it was always meant to serve.

Kar Setu is live. The bridge is built.

Election Duty in Tamil Nadu

The alarm goes off at 4:30 AM in Girnar Guest House in Kaushambi. It is the 18th of March 2026. I have packed the night before. Three copies of my appointment letter. Six passport-size photographs. A hardbound diary. Blue pen, black pen, red pen. The red one, I suspect, will see the most use.

On my laptop, my phone, and a pen drive, there is a PDF I have been reading for two days. The Compendium of Instructions on Election Expenditure Monitoring, December 2024 edition. Five hundred and some pages. It is going to be my reference manual for the next forty-five days.

I have been following money trail in Income Tax. Today, I am going to follow money in a different place.

The Election Commission of India has appointed me as Expenditure Observer for the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly Elections, 2026. My constituency is 86-Edappadi, Salem District. 

My job is straightforward. Every candidate contesting this seat can spend a maximum of Rs. 40 lakh under Rule 90 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961. I am here to make sure that limit is respected. And to catch the spending that candidates would rather not declare: the cash, the liquor, the freebies, the vehicles that never make it into any register.

Different domain. Same discipline. Follow the money.

The flight leaves Delhi at 7:05 AM. I land in Bangalore by mid-morning and make my way to Salem by a connecting flight. The landscape changes as you cross into Tamil Nadu. The soil turns red. Granite quarries appear on hillsides. Steel plants. Sago factories. Roadside stalls selling tender coconut. The signboards switch to Tamil, a script I cannot read.

Salem is bigger and more industrial than I expect. Thirty lakh people live in this district. Eleven Assembly constituencies. One Lok Sabha seat. A steel plant, a river, a busy corporation. This is not a sleepy town. This is a serious place.

A blue-beacon Innova is waiting for me. My Liaison Officer, Thiru. Duraisamy, and my PSO, Thiru. Samuel, are standing beside it. In the grammar of Indian government, a blue-beacon vehicle is a statement. It says: the Election Commission is here. Word travels in a constituency. By evening, people in Edappadi will know that the Expenditure Observer has arrived.

That is by design.

Most people think of elections as rallies and speeches and ballot boxes. They do not think about what runs underneath.

India's election expenditure monitoring system is, quietly, one of the most ambitious real-time financial surveillance operations in any democracy. Flying Squads patrol highways at 3 AM, stopping vehicles and checking for cash. Static Surveillance Teams sit at junctions with cameras and logbooks. Video teams record every rally and public meeting so that someone can later count the chairs, measure the pandal, estimate the cost, and ask: did the candidate report this?

Check posts on every major road. An Election Seizure Management System that logs every seizure of cash, liquor, drugs, or freebies in real time. Shadow registers that track observed expenditure independently of what candidates declare.

And at the centre of this system, an Expenditure Observer in every constituency. 

I meet the police first. The Superintendent of Police, Salem.

We sit across a table and talk about money. Not money in the abstract. Cash movement corridors through the district. Drug transit routes that get repurposed during elections for distributing inducements. Liquor supply chains. The geography of how money and material flow into a constituency when an election is on.

We exchange phone numbers. That is the real deliverable of the meeting.

Then the Collector. District Collector and District Election Officer, Salem. 

She manages eleven constituencies simultaneously. She knows the machinery.

I also meet the Commissioner of Police. That is three institutional meetings in a single afternoon. Three sets of phone numbers saved. Three relationships established.

The foundation is being laid.

Then I leave Salem for Edappadi.

Forty-two kilometres west. The road passes through Tharamangalam. The landscape opens into the kind of small-town Tamil Nadu that runs on agriculture, granite, and local commerce. The Mettur Dam, one of the largest in India, sits at the edge of this constituency.

I arrive in the late evening. The temperature is 36 degrees. My accommodation is an Inspection Bungalow. 

I meet the Assistant Expenditure Observer and the Returning Officer's team. These are the people who will actually run the expenditure monitoring on the ground every day. Block-level officials. Taluk-level officers. People who know every lane in this constituency.

I explain the shadow register. This is the most important tool in my kit. A parallel ledger maintained independently by my team, recording every observed campaign activity and its estimated cost based on the DEO's rate charts. When a candidate declares they spent fifteen lakh and my shadow register shows thirty-five lakh of observed activity, that gap is where the questions begin.

I set up the daily reporting protocol with the AEO. Summary every evening by 8 PM. Seizures reported immediately. No delays. No filtering.

They save my number. I save theirs. And a whatsapp group is created.

Here is what I have learned on Day 1.

The machinery exists. The teams are being assembled. The infrastructure is taking shape. Salem district has a competent Collector, a sharp SP, and a police commissionerate that is engaged. At the constituency level, the AEO and RO team are in place.

Whether the machinery works under pressure is a different question. That is what the next four days are for. I will inspect check posts. I will visit Flying Squads in the field. I will meet State Excise officials. I will walk through the Expenditure Sensitive Pockets identified in this constituency. I will look at registers and formats and verify that the teams are not just formed on paper but actually functioning on the ground.

There is something I keep thinking about.

In tax administration, the stakes are revenue. Important, certainly. A nation runs on what it collects.

In election monitoring, the stakes are the process itself. Every rupee of unaccounted expenditure is a small crack in the integrity of a democratic exercise. Every cash envelope distributed to a voter is an attempt to convert a citizen's choice into a transaction. The expenditure monitoring system exists to hold that line.

I am not being dramatic about this. It is just a fact. The line holds because someone is watching. The observer is not only a checker of registers. The observer is a signal that someone is counting.

A note on language.

I do not speak Tamil. This is, to put it mildly, a limitation when you are posted in Tamil Nadu.

But I have discovered that vanakkam, said with folded hands and a genuine smile, opens every door. That nandri, said often, builds goodwill faster than any official letter. And that sari, meaning OK, meaning understood, meaning let us proceed, is the single most useful word in the working vocabulary of Indian governance.

My Liaison Officer, Thiru. Duraisamy, handles the rest with a patience I find remarkable. The block-level officials speak enough English that we get by. In government, the real language is not Hindi or Tamil or English. It is the language of registers, formats, reports, and deadlines. That language, I speak fluently.

It is late now. The ceiling fan turns. The night outside is warm and full of the sounds of a Tamil Nadu small town: insects, a distant temple speaker, the occasional auto-rickshaw.

I open my diary and write the day's observations. Four meetings. Two cities. One overnight transformation from a tax officer in Delhi to an election observer in a constituency I had never visited before this morning.

I have four more days in this visit. Then back to Delhi for a week. Then back here on the 30th of March when the gazette notification drops. Then continuously from the 5th of April through polling day on the 23rd.

The work has begun.

Vanakkam, Tamil Nadu. 

India's First Global AI Summit

The first-ever global AI summit hosted in the Global South just kicked off in Delhi. And I was there on the expo floor yesterday.

Bharat Mandapam was buzzing — 300+ exhibitors from over 110 countries, 20+ Heads of State converging later this week, and Sundar Pichai landing in Delhi for a keynote. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is massive by any measure.

Which of these AI tools can actually survive contact with Indian government reality?

Not the pitch deck reality. The ground reality. The 10,000-user, legacy-system, compliance-heavy, can't-afford-downtime reality.

With that lens, I walked the expo floor for hours. And seven solutions stood out — not because they had the flashiest booths, but because they addressed problems I deal with every single day.

Here's what I found.

1. Deloitte PRAGYA — When Consulting Meets AI at Scale

Deloitte's PRAGYA platform wasn't just another enterprise AI dashboard. What caught my attention was how it bridges the gap between strategic advisory and operational execution.

In government, we've seen no shortage of consulting reports that gather dust on shelves. What we need are tools that take a recommendation and help you implement it — across hundreds of offices, with varying levels of digital maturity, in real time.

PRAGYA seems to be built for exactly that kind of complexity. For large-scale government transformation programs — the kind where you're implementing a new Act across an entire department — this is the type of AI-assisted project intelligence that could change how we manage reform.

2. LKS In-House Litigation Management — This One Hit Home

If you've ever managed litigation portfolios in government, you know the pain. Thousands of cases. Multiple courts. Overlapping deadlines. Paper trails that would fill a warehouse.

I've spent years in ITAT litigation and transfer pricing disputes both in Mumbai and Amritsar, including cases worth hundreds of crores. The single biggest bottleneck isn't legal strategy — it's tracking, coordination, and institutional memory.

LKS has built an AI-powered litigation management system designed for in-house legal teams (as of now). Automated case tracking, deadline management, outcome analysis, and pattern recognition across your case portfolio.

For the Income Tax Department — which handles lakhs of cases across the country at any given time — a system like this isn't a luxury. It's an operational necessity. The question isn't whether we need it. It's how fast we can adapt it to our scale.

3. Smoothtalk AI — Virtual Calling That Could Transform Citizen Services

Picture this: a taxpayer in a Tier 3 city has a query about their assessment. Today, they call a helpline, wait, get transferred, explain their problem three times, and maybe — maybe — get a resolution.

Smoothtalk AI is building virtual calling agents that can handle these interactions with natural, human-like conversation. Not the robotic IVR menus we've all grown to hate. Actual contextual dialogue.

For any government department that handles millions of citizen queries — and the Income Tax Department certainly does — this technology could fundamentally reshape the service delivery experience. Imagine every taxpayer getting an intelligent, patient, context-aware agent on the other end of the line, available 24/7, in multiple languages.

We're not there yet. But the demo I saw suggests we're closer than most people think.

4. Government AI — A UK Perspective on Sovereign Deployment

This one was fascinating for a different reason. Government AI is a UK-based platform built specifically for public sector use cases.

What made me stop and engage wasn't just the product. It was the philosophy. They've clearly thought through the unique constraints of government — compliance requirements, audit trails, data sensitivity, and the fact that "move fast and break things" is not an acceptable operating principle when you're dealing with citizens' data and rights.

Seeing how another country approaches sovereign AI deployment gives useful comparative perspective. At CBDT, as we think about integrating AI into tax administration, understanding global best practices — not just Silicon Valley practices — is essential. The UK's approach to government-specific AI platforms is worth studying closely. They infact have their own courses on iGOT platform.

5. ACTUALITY — On-Premise Deployment for Data That Can't Leave the Building

This is the unsexy but critical conversation that most AI summits skip.

Every AI vendor will tell you their cloud solution is secure. And maybe it is — for a private company. But when you're dealing with taxpayer data, national security information, or sensitive government records, "trust our cloud" is not sufficient.

ACTUALITY offers on-premise AI deployment. Your data stays on your servers. Your models run on your infrastructure. Full control, full compliance.

For Indian government agencies bound by data localization requirements and handling some of the most sensitive personal data in the country, on-premise deployment isn't optional. It's the baseline requirement for any serious AI adoption. ACTUALITY understands this, and that alone puts them ahead of a lot of flashier competitors who haven't thought through the government procurement and compliance lens.

6. Sovereign AI — Local LLMs for Government Solutions

If ACTUALITY addresses where the data lives, Sovereign AI addresses something equally important: where the intelligence comes from.

Large Language Models trained on Western internet data don't inherently understand Indian tax law, Hindi administrative procedures, or the nuances of how a CBDT circular differs from a notification. They can approximate. They can't natively operate in our context.

Sovereign AI is building local LLMs designed for government use — models trained on local data, in local languages, for local administrative contexts. Data stays within borders. Models understand the operating environment they're deployed in.

This is the future of public sector AI, and India — with its scale, linguistic diversity, and digital infrastructure ambitions — should be leading this charge. The IndiaAI Mission's focus on building indigenous AI capacity aligns perfectly with what Sovereign AI is demonstrating.

I can tell you: the gap between a generic LLM and one that understands Section 148A of the Income Tax Act 1961 is not a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a tool that helps and one that creates more problems than it solves.

7. FUSKI.ai — Training Your Workforce Before You Deploy Your AI

Here's a truth that doesn't get enough airtime at AI summits: the biggest bottleneck to AI adoption in government isn't technology. It's people.

You can have the most sophisticated AI system in the world, but if the 50,000 officers who are supposed to use it don't understand it, don't trust it, and haven't been trained on it — you've just bought a very expensive piece of software that nobody opens.

FUSKI.ai builds AI-powered training modules for workforce upskilling. Custom learning paths. Adaptive difficulty. Progress tracking. The kind of structured capability building that large organizations need before they can meaningfully adopt AI tools.

When I think about our challenge at CBDT — implementing a new Act across 700+ offices with staff at wildly different levels of digital comfort — this is exactly the gap that needs filling. You can't just send a circular saying "use AI now." You need a systematic, scalable training infrastructure.

FUSKI.ai could be that infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture

Walking the expo floor, what struck me most wasn't any individual product. It was the shift in the overall conversation.

Three years ago, the question at these events was: "Should government use AI?"

Two years ago, it became: "Can government use AI responsibly?"

Yesterday at Bharat Mandapam, the question had evolved to: "How fast can we deploy AI, and what's stopping us?"

That's a seismic shift. And it tells you something about where India — and the Global South more broadly — stands in the AI landscape. We're not spectators in this revolution. We're not waiting for Silicon Valley to build solutions and then adapting them for our context.

We're building. We're deploying. We're setting the terms.

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 — anchored in the three Sutras of People, Planet, and Progress — isn't just a diplomatic gathering. It's a statement of intent. India is positioning itself as a global convenor for responsible, inclusive AI. And based on what I saw on the expo floor, the ecosystem is rising to match that ambition.

The summit continues through February 20th (in fact extended to 21st Feb for general public), with PM Modi's inaugural address tomorrow setting the tone for the main event. I'll be watching closely.

But if the expo is any indication, the future of AI in governance isn't coming.

It's already here. Walking the floor at Bharat Mandapam.

Teaching AI to Global Tax Officials

NADT had invited me to deliver two sessions as part of their ITEC programme on "Innovations in Tax Administration: Building Capacity for the Future." The morning session was about opportunity — how generative AI is reshaping everything from taxpayer services to complex cross-border investigations. The afternoon was about the guardrails — data privacy, algorithmic bias, ethical governance, and the cautionary tales of what happens when governments deploy AI without asking the right questions first.

On paper, these are two separate topics. In practice, they're inseparable. You can't talk about the transformative potential of AI in tax administration without immediately confronting the question: at what cost, and to whom?

That tension — between innovation and protection, between speed and fairness — became the throughline of my entire day in Nagpur.

The Room That Changed My Perspective

Here's what I wasn't fully prepared for: the quality of the questions.

I walked in expecting to explain foundational concepts. What is a large language model? What does RAG architecture mean? How does prompt engineering work? And yes, some of that was necessary. But the participants — officers from developing economies across Asia, Africa, and beyond — weren't just absorbing information passively. They were interrogating it.

One officer asked how you prevent an AI-assisted audit system from encoding historical biases in taxpayer selection. Another wanted to know how her country, with limited digital infrastructure, could adopt AI without deepening the digital divide. A third pushed back on the idea that AI could meaningfully assist in transfer pricing without understanding the specific regulatory nuances of his jurisdiction.

These weren't theoretical objections. They were the questions of people who would actually have to implement these systems back home, with real constraints and real consequences.

That shift — from "should we adopt AI?" to "how do we adopt it responsibly?" — told me something important. The global conversation about AI in government has moved past the hype phase. What people want now is practical, honest guidance.

What I Showed Them (And What I Learned Showing It)

In the morning session, I walked through real examples rather than hypotheticals. India's NUDGE campaign, where AI-powered behavioural nudges led to 24,678 taxpayers voluntarily revising their returns and disclosing ₹29,208 crore in foreign assets — with zero litigation. Singapore's IRAS chatbot, which saved over 11,000 officer-hours. The CBDT's ₹3,000 crore data analytics project with LTIMindtree that's building predictive capabilities at a national scale.

I also got personal. I showed them the time-savings analysis from my own transfer pricing work — how document review that used to take eight weeks can now be compressed to two, how comparability analysis that consumed a month now takes three days. The room went quiet when I put up the numbers. Not because the technology was surprising, but because the implications were immediate. Every officer in that room was mentally mapping those efficiency gains onto their own caseload.

But the moment that stayed with me came in the afternoon.

The Cautionary Tales That Matter

When I brought up Australia's Robodebt scandal — where an automated debt recovery system wrongly targeted hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients — the energy in the room shifted. This wasn't abstract anymore. These were real governments, using real algorithms, causing real harm to real people.

The Netherlands childcare benefits crisis, where an AI system flagged families — disproportionately those with dual nationalities — for fraud based on flawed data and biased algorithms, hit even harder. Some participants came from countries with similar demographic complexities. The lesson wasn't subtle: if wealthy, technologically advanced nations can get this catastrophically wrong, what does that mean for countries with fewer resources to build safeguards?

I made a point that I believe deeply: these failures weren't caused by bad people. They were caused by good people who asked "Can we automate this?" before asking "Should we automate this?" Who asked "How much will this save?" before asking "Who might this harm?"

The room didn't just nod along. They debated. They shared examples from their own contexts. They pushed me to be more specific about what "human oversight" actually looks like in practice when you're understaffed and under-resourced.

What I'm Taking Away

Three things crystallised for me during that day in Nagpur.

First, the demand for practical AI literacy in government is enormous and largely unmet. Officers don't need more keynote speeches about the "fourth industrial revolution." They need to sit down with a tool, try a prompt, see what works, understand what fails, and build intuition through practice. The most engaged moments in my sessions weren't during the slides — they were during the live demonstrations, when participants could see AI drafting a tax notice or analysing a scenario in real time. I gave a live demonstration of how we give a context in a prompt and how does it lead to a customised notice generation.

Second, developing economies have a genuine opportunity to leapfrog. They're not burdened by legacy systems the way some advanced administrations are. If they build thoughtfully — with ethical frameworks baked in from day one rather than bolted on after a scandal — they can set a global standard. That's not wishful thinking. It's a strategic possibility, and it requires exactly the kind of cross-country learning that programmes like ITEC enable.

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

Tax administration isn't glamorous. It doesn't make headlines unless something goes wrong. But it's the infrastructure that funds schools, hospitals, roads, and defence. When we get it right, societies function. When we get it wrong — through bias, opacity, or carelessness — the most vulnerable bear the cost.

So the question isn't whether AI will transform tax administration. It already is. The question is whether we — the people in the room that day, and the thousands like us around the world — will shape that transformation with the care it demands.

I left Nagpur cautiously optimistic that we will.