September 30, 2026: The great uncertainty of our time is not whether the world is changing. It is whether our existing political and institutional imagination is capable of keeping pace with that change.
Across geographies, economies and societies, some of the assumptions that shaped the last several decades are being reconsidered, recalibrated.
It is within this reality that the NDTV World Summit 2026 returns to New Delhi on October 22 and 23, under the theme ‘A World Between Orders.’
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, like the previous two editions, will lay the contours of the Summit – setting the stage for two days of conversations with some of the most consequential voices in geopolitics, global strategy, business and economy and a host of other domains.
The Summit will bring together an eclectic and influential group of voices, including Dr Swarnim Wagle, Federal Minister of Finance of Nepal; Sanjay Malhotra, Governor, Reserve Bank of India; Swami Sarvapriyananda, Minister and Spiritual Leader, Vedanta Society of New York; Nikhil Kamath, Founder, Zerodha; and Mike Walsh, Futurist and AI Specialist.
Together, they will bring perspectives spanning geopolitics and global strategy, monetary policy and the global economy, economics and enterprise, artificial intelligence and the future of work, spirituality and philosophy, and the increasingly consequential relationship between technology and humanity.
The theme for this year reflects a reality that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The world today is negotiating the space in between a period in which inherited structures continue to matter, even as new centres of influence, new economic ambitions and new ideas of sovereignty begin to alter the terms on which the global system operates.
That space between what has been and what is emerging is where some of the most important questions of our time now reside.
What does strategic autonomy mean in a world built on interdependence?
Can technology remain borderless when data and artificial intelligence increasingly sit at the heart of national power?
Can multilateralism retain legitimacy if its structures do not reflect the realities of the societies they seek to represent?
And can a more multipolar world become a more balanced one without becoming a more fragmented one?
These questions are no longer academic. They are shaping policy, diplomacy, trade, investment, technology and the choices nations make about their future – in a volatile, uncertain world.
The NDTV World Summit has, over successive editions, sought to bring such questions into one conversation by placing politics alongside economics, technology alongside society, diplomacy alongside enterprise, and power alongside ideas.
The stature of the conversation was evident in the last edition, which brought together the rare presence of two sitting Prime Ministers and two former Prime Ministers – Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Dr Harini Amarasuriya, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
The 2026 edition is being curated with the same ambition and an even wider global canvas.
Across two days, the Summit will bring together a constellation of global voices and critical changemakers from politics and diplomacy, business and economics, technology and science, culture and society – people whose ideas, decisions and work are shaping the direction in which the world moves.
The intention is not simply to assemble influence. It is to bring different forms of influence into conversation with one another.
It will spotlight a wide spectrum of interdependent questions that ring the modern world. For example, artificial intelligence is as much a question of governance as it is of innovation. Trade is as much about strategic resilience as economic efficiency. And the debate over the Global South is no longer only about representation – it is about whether the new rules of the game can accommodate new centres of confidence and consequence.
India sits at the heart of many of these conversations.
Its economic scale, technological ambition, demographic weight and diplomatic reach give it an increasingly important role in a world that is becoming less hierarchical and more distributed. India today is not simply negotiating its place within an existing order.
That makes A World Between Orders relevant and consequential. For the world. And for India.
It is a frame through which to examine a world in which the familiar still survives, but no longer fully explains the present; in which new possibilities are visible, but their consequences remain unresolved; and in which the choices being made today may determine the institutions, alliances and ideas that define the decades ahead.
The NDTV World Summit 2026 will bring those choices into focus.
Not simply to ask where the world is going. But where it can go from here.
