G20 Innovation Ministerial: Jitin Prasada Leads India at Chapel Hill

Shri Jitin Prasada, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and for Commerce and Industry, led the Indian delegation to the G20 Innovation Ministers' Meeting. The meeting was held on 1 and 2 September 2026 at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, United States. The hosts were the US Department of Commerce and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Officials of MeitY, the Department of Science and Technology and DPIIT went with the minister.

What the ministers agreed

The ministers issued an Innovation Ministerial Statement by consensus. It records that emerging technologies can unlock prosperity, raise productivity and widen opportunity. The statement rests on six pillars.

• Pro-innovation policy frameworks
• Technology for opportunity and prosperity
• Development of a skilled technical workforce
• Intellectual property policies for artificial intelligence
• AI for standards and standards for AI
• Industrial innovation and investment in supply chains

Ministers also agreed on the Carolina Principles for Emerging Technologies. These ask countries to put money into foundational research, to strengthen the paths by which research becomes a product, and to make trusted technology easier to adopt. Two further outcomes were the AI Prosperity Objectives and the AI Prosperity Compact, both meant to build the technical workforce of G20 countries and to widen private sector partnership.

India's bilateral meetings

The minister met Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission, and Anne Le Henanff, France's Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs. He met the Parliamentary State Secretaries of Germany, and Prof. Gaspard Banyankimbona of the African Union, to whom India offered its India Stack solutions. With Howard Lutnick, the US Secretary of Commerce, he raised American investment in ISM 2.0 and a shared mechanism of safeguards for AI.

Duke University

After the ministerial the minister visited Duke University. He toured the Robotics Laboratory of the Pratt School of Engineering and met researchers working on robotics, biomedical simulation, AI-enabled sensing and machine learning.