Estonian minister ‘welcomes’ Indian tech talent as Washington suspends residency programme; lauds Indian action on fake news

New Delhi: Estonia’s justice and digital affairs minister has said the Baltic state welcomes skilled talent from India after the United States suspended a key route to permanent residency for several major IT firms.

“All talent is welcome,” Liisa-Ly Pakosta told WION's Sidhant Sibal in Delhi, responding to Washington’s decision to bar companies including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and HCL from the Permanent Labor Certification programme. The move, announced on Thursday, prevents those employers from filing new applications or processing pending ones that allow foreign staff to seek green cards.

Estonia, with a population of about 1.3 million, already hosts more than 2,000 people from India, most of them in information technology, along with more than 200 Indian students, she said. “We see huge possibilities for growth,” Pakosta added, pointing to demand for scalable digital products.

Pakosta pointed Estonia as a highly digitised country. Government services are almost entirely online, data systems are designed to work together, and the private sector builds much of the infrastructure, she said.

The country’s X-Road interoperability platform has been adopted elsewhere, including in Ukraine, where she said it continued to function securely for a population of about 40 million “even under the full-scale war situation.”

She argued that Estonia’s small size and India’s research capacity could complement each other, particularly in artificial intelligence. “The solutions from Estonia are well scalable here, but at the same time we have so much to learn from your side, because you invest a lot to research and development on the huge scale,” she said. Partnerships would still require risk assessments, she noted.

On cybersecurity, Pakosta said the threat environment had shifted with the rise of AI-driven attacks and that Estonia already had a cooperation agreement with India. She called for joint work on defences that operate “literally online and without any delay.” Data protection, she added, becomes more important in the AI era because “all the mistakes could be exponential.”

Asked about deepfakes and online misinformation, she highlighted Estonia’s early media-literacy education and praised India’s requirement that platforms remove false information quickly, saying she would like to see that approach become an international standard.

On regulating large technology platforms, Pakosta defended free expression while warning that foreign actors were altering historical narratives inside large language models and interfering in elections. “International regulation is very, very much needed,” she said, including guardrails against propaganda intended “to take the other nation down.”

She compared AI to nuclear power, with beneficial and harmful uses, and said like-minded countries should set rules that expand access,through open-source tools, for example, while limiting systems capable of “tremendous harm.”