Between Niti and Nyaya: A Society-Centered Framework for AI Governance

Snehalkumar `Neil' S. Gaikwad, Punya Aragula, Shiva Kruthi Palpanoori, Pratik Patekar

Governments are making decisions about AI before they can measure its public effects, and those decisions determine whether a person can learn that AI influenced an outcome, challenge it, and see it corrected. Research has documented what AI governance produces: principles, strategies, registers, and audits. However, we lack shared language for understanding AI policy while it is still being made. We introduce the Society-Centered AI Governance Framework, which gives policymakers, researchers, and the public a way to assess instruments in any jurisdiction by whether a person can get notice, challenge a decision, and see it corrected. It reads a jurisdiction's instruments together by date and binding status, separates an agency duty from a right a person can invoke, and traces which later instrument must enforce each commitment. We evaluated it in North Carolina using interviews with nine AI Leadership Council members, conducted before and after the state's 2026 AI roadmap, and a provision-level reading, with human-reviewed model-assisted coding, of 49 AI governance documents from 19 states. For the state's own AI systems, we find visibility-first governance: visibility duties are…