NEW DELHI: In June, M. Sheeja spent all her money to pool with another 10 friends at work to buy a $3 lottery ticket that none of them could afford individually. Last week, they found out they had hit the jackpot.
The lottery was 100 million rupees ($1.2 million), an enormous sum for the women in the southern Indian state of Kerala who have been collecting household waste for a living.
When they entered the lucky draw, Sheeja had no money left to pay for her transportation to return from work in the coastal municipality of Parappanangadi.
“That day I took a good decision to walk back home,” the 48-year-old mother of three told Arab News.
After taxes, the women will receive around $700,000.
They had agreed that each of them would get an equal share if they won.
It was the fourth time they bought a ticket together in the popular state-run bumper prize lottery that runs every year ahead of the Onam harvest festival.
“It was the biggest surprise of my life,” Sheeja said. “For us it is a huge amount that can relieve us from the burdens of daily struggle.”
Like other workers in her group, she earns less than $100 a month — an amount that is insufficient to make ends meet, leaving most of them trapped in debt.
“I will repay the debt, do some repair work at home and spend the money on educating my three children,” Sheeja said.
The other women have similar plans. One of them, M.P. Radha, 49, is relieved that she would be able to pay for her brother’s medical treatment. She has been trying her luck for several years.
“I have never won more than 1,000 rupees. The draw this time was quite surprising, and it was more than what we could have ever imagined,” she said. “This money hopefully will ease my life.”
Despite the win, she and her colleagues plan to continue their work. “There is no question of leaving the job as this job gave us stability in life,” said M. Laxmi, a 47-year-old mother of three, who now will be able to pay her husband’s hospital bills.
“I want to dig a well for my house, spend some money on marrying off my daughter, and also take my husband to a good hospital for treatment.”
She hopes that with the lottery win there will be no more stress over daily survival and that now luck will remain on her side.
“I hope to have an easy life now,” she said. “But I won’t stop buying lottery tickets.”
Indian sanitation workers get new chance in life with $1.2m lottery win
https://arab.news/22nz5
Indian sanitation workers get new chance in life with $1.2m lottery win
- 11 women in Kerala pooled money for a $3 lottery ticket in June
- Each earns less than $100 a month from collecting household waste
India hosts global leaders, tech moguls at AI Impact Summit
- 20 heads of state scheduled to attend event which runs until Feb. 20
- Summit expected to speed up adoption of AI in India’s governance, expert says
NEW DELHI: A global artificial intelligence summit opened in New Delhi on Monday, with representatives of more than 60 countries scheduled to discuss the use and regulation of AI with the industry’s leaders and investors.
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is hosted by the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission — an initiative worth in excess of $1 billion and launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in 2024 to develop the AI ecosystem in the country.
After five days of sessions and an accompanying exhibition of 300 companies at Bharat Mandapam — the venue of the 2023 G20 summit — participating leaders are expected to sign a declaration which, according to the organizer, will outline a “shared road map for global AI governance and collaboration.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will attend the summit on Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, said on X it was a “matter of great pride for us that people from around the world are coming to India” for the event, which is evidence that the country is “rapidly advancing in the fields of science and technology and is making a significant contribution to global development.”
Among the 20 heads of state that the Indian Ministry of External Affairs has announced as scheduled to attend are Macron, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, and Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince.
Also expected are tech moguls such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google’s chief Sundar Pichai.
The summit will give India, the world’s most populous country, a platform to try to steer cooperation and AI regulation between the West and the Global South, and to present to the global audience its own technological development.
“India is leveraging its position as a bridge between emerging and developed economies to bring together not just country leaders and technologists, but also delegates, policy analysts, media, and others … to explore the facets of AI, multilateral collaborations, and the direction that large-scale development of AI should take,” said Anwesha Sen, assistant program manager for technology and policy at Takshashila Institution.
“India is trying to do three things through the AI Impact Summit. One, India is advocating for sovereign AI and the development of inclusive, population-scale solutions. Two, establishing international collaborations that prioritize AI diffusion in sectors like healthcare and agriculture. And three, showcasing how Indian startups and organizations are using frameworks such as that of digital public infrastructure as a model to bridge the two.”
It is the fourth such gathering dedicated to the development of AI. The first one was held in the UK in 2023, a year after the debut of ChatGPT; the 2024 meeting in South Korea; and last year’s event took place in France.
The summit is likely to help the Indian government in speeding up the adoption of AI, according to Nikhil Pahwa, digital rights activist and founder of MediaNama, a mobile and digital news portal, who likened it to the Digital India initiative launched in 2015 to provide digital government services.
“A summit like this, with this much bandwidth allocated to it by the government, even if the agenda is flat, ends up making AI a priority focus for ministries and state governments,” Pahwa told Arab News.
“It encourages diffusion of AI execution-specific thinking and ends up increasing adoption of AI in governance and by both central and state-level ministries. That reduces time for adoption of AI.
“We saw this play out with the government’s Digital India focus: it increased digitization and the adoption of digital technology. The agenda and India’s role in AI globally is less important than speeding up adoption.”
