Every January, the Swiss alpine town of Davos becomes the magnet for a particular stratum of global influence: CEOs, finance ministers, technology chiefs, entrepreneurs and a constellation of think-tankers who converge to exchange ideas, ink deals, and shape narratives about the world economy.
People gather in Davos because it is more than a conference. It is a curated marketplace of relationships where capital meets policy, signal-setting speeches are amplified into headlines, and informal conversations create formal outcomes. But the understandable question for the next decade is: why must that marketplace be constrained to a single alpine venue when a richer, more diverse global conversation could be convened from elsewhere, and why, in particular, should the world look to India to host it?
Today, India offers a combination of reach and resonance. And, very few other countries can offer the same. India is the world’s most consequential large democracy, a fast-growing market, and an incubator of ideas that matter to both the Global North and Global South. Moreover, India combines modern infrastructure with a living cultural plurality. It has built digital public goods such as Aadhaar and UPI that reduce transaction costs across society, it runs national programmes to scale manufacturing and innovation, and its private sector hosts scale and dynamism.
These are not abstract assets: they are the practical elements that make a global economic forum both useful and replicable at scale. A forum held in India would not be a provincial imitation of Davos; it would be a complementary platform in which growth, inclusion and sustainability are debated from the perspective of the majority of humanity.
There are clear reasons why global leaders should come to India. First, India is not only a market, but also a crossroads. It is placed advantageously over Asian supply chains, sea lanes, and an arc of developing economies stretching across South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and West Asia. Thus, posing a problem both to corporates looking to shore up their supply chains and policymakers shaping relationships with the global south, the value of the idea as a cutting-edge can be tested out in the lab of the Indian continent.
Second, there is the experience that could be relevant to the scale and complexity involved in the event. From the Pravasi Bharatiya Sammelan to the logistical management of massive pilgrim gatherings like the Kumbh, India has demonstrated a clear capacity for handling complex events. The successful conduct of the G20 summit presidency has since extended this capability into the international arena.
Economic and societal gains
A special kind of India-centric platform will therefore be able to provide a divergent content and a divergent ‘moral economy’ too: “The glamour of globalisation at Davos is its elite networking; India can be a place where the highest strata of global capital meet a unrelenting focus on development outcomes, development technologies, the architecture in fields that are reducing poverty, creating decent jobs, or accelerating the energy revolution.”
What will interest billions of people yet seldom feature prominently in northern agendas? Browse through India’s own programs: the International Solar Alliance, green hydrogen, digital stacks—there’s credibility and substance to offer to partners in the Global South as they plan their development trajectories faster or slower than our own.
Practically, a platform will have to be curated in India, yet also anchored internationally. It will not necessarily require a single city-based icon; instead, rotating this forum through Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad will help in highlighting core competencies, such as policy leadership, financial centres, technology nodes, and manufacturing clusters.
Moreover, this model will require a strong diplomatic effort to design the platform as a new form of dialogue, combining high-level ministerial plenaries, CEO rounds, and policy-focused engagements that enable cross-platform standard-setting. The design must also accommodate startups and SMEs, alongside culinary and other soft-power elements, recognising that India’s food, art, literature and filmmaking traditions can make this diplomacy enduring enough for dialogue, trust and commerce to follow.
The gains would be economic as well as societal. Hosting a global economic forum would catalyse inbound business travel and tourism in India, stimulate local MICE ecosystems and accelerate pipelines of FDI through on-site MOUs and joint ventures, and create multiplier effects in the hospitality, logistics, and professional services domains. More importantly, the intellectual impact would be structural. By placing narratives of inclusive growth, climate justice and technology for development on a global stage led by an emerging economy, the world benefits from a rebalanced conversation in which the priorities of the Global South are not merely an addendum but a framing principle.
Also read: The world’s issues took a back seat at Davos. WEF was all about satiating Trump
Differentiation, not replication
Sceptics will ask whether an India forum could match Davos’s cachet. The answer lies in differentiation, not replication. A successful Indian forum would not attempt to mimic Davos’s exclusivity; it would compete on relevance. Execs and ministers attend Davos to meet peers and move markets. They will come to India to meet new partners, unlock emerging supply chains, pilot scalable development projects and open markets of unprecedented size. Many global institutions already collaborate with India on sectoral initiatives; formalising those relationships into an annual platform would accelerate decision cycles and increase accountability for promises made.
There is also a diplomatic logic to holding a WEF-style event in India. This would enhance the architecture of multilaterals simply by providing an additional or alternate platform for the development of coalitions with a permanent seat for the Global South on the agenda-setting table. This is relevant to the shift in the global balance of power. It would provide redundancy for global intellectual culture—removing risks of a monoculture—and we should embrace this as a superior design feature in global architecture.
Finally, the price of non-innovation could also be seen in a rather more hidden fashion. If global debates were held in northern locations only, a huge price might attach to those policy instruments, as they could become out of touch with the realities of the majority world. The simplicity of India’s offer is part of its profundity. Bring the world to where the issues are lived, and where solutions are in active formation.
The world would benefit from new perspectives, new markets, and new stable alliances. India, in turn, would secure its new role, less through display of mimicry, more through offering a new form of pragmatism.
If the idea is taken seriously, India already has the building blocks—governance capacity, digital infrastructure, event experience and cultural gravitas—to create a forum that complements, rather than competes with, existing global gatherings. The task now is for business, government and civil society to agree on a time, a place and a promise: to convene a Global India Forum that sets an agenda for a world where growth is not only measured in GDP but in resilience, inclusion and shared prosperity. The next era of global leadership will favour platforms that are authentic and effective; India’s moment to host such a platform has arrived.
Meenakashi Lekhi is a BJP leader, lawyer and social activist. Her X handle is @M_Lekhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)