Eighty to ninety percent of global trade documentation is still paper. Shipping invoices, bills of lading, certificates of origin — the clerical architecture of international commerce has barely changed since the containerisation era. That a single statistic should anchor the priorities of the new chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce shows how far the multilateral trading system has drifted from the practical mechanics of the businesses it claims to serve.
Harsh Pati Singhania, chairman and managing director of JK Paper Ltd, took the ICC's top job in July 2026 — only the fourth Indian to lead the Paris-based organisation in its 107-year history. The ICC represents over 45 million businesses across 170 countries through a network of more than 90 national committees. Singhania arrives with a clear agenda: accelerate the digitisation of global trade documentation, build interoperable systems across national borders, and establish responsible AI governance rules before the regulatory vacuum fills with others' preferences.
The Paper Trail That Costs Billions
The numbers Singhania confronts are not abstract. The ICC has identified 36 core trade documents and nearly 190 common data elements that require standardisation and digitisation under its Digital Standards Initiative. Digital standards for more than 20 of those documents have already been developed. The bottleneck now is political, not technical. Governments need to adopt them, and most have not.
The fragmentation problem is structural. Every country builds its own digital trade infrastructure, optimised for its own customs authority, tax system, and port logistics. When those systems cannot communicate with each other, the friction lands hardest on the businesses least able to absorb it — the small and medium enterprises that constitute the backbone of manufacturing and services trade in every developing economy. Singhania is explicit that SME access is the human cost of the interoperability gap: reduce the complexity, reduce the cost, and you expand the effective universe of exporters.
The WTO's institutional paralysis gives this urgency a sharper edge. Singhania acknowledges the WTO faces real challenges, but frames its relevance as intact — what's needed is practical cooperation and digital integration, not a funeral for multilateralism. Countries increasingly rely on bilateral and regional agreements, which means standards set outside the WTO framework carry disproportionate gravitational pull. The ICC, which engages the UN, G20, G7, and BRICS, is precisely the kind of private-sector institution that fills normative space when intergovernmental bodies stall.
The Standard-Setter's Advantage
Here is where Singhania's elevation matters structurally, not ceremonially. The EU's AI Act is already in force. US executive orders on AI have reshaped procurement rules and export controls. China's generative-AI regulations impose their own template on firms operating in or connected to Chinese supply chains. These three regulatory architectures are not coordinating with each other — they are competing to become the reference point that everyone else adopts by default. The Global South has historically arrived late to this competition and paid the price in compliance asymmetry: standards written for large regulated markets with sophisticated enforcement infrastructure impose disproportionate burdens on economies where the regulatory apparatus is still being built.
India knows this pattern well. The intellectual-property architecture of the 1990s — the TRIPS Agreement and its successors — was negotiated largely between the US, Europe, and Japan, with developing countries absorbing the outcome. The MEA has consistently argued, in AI governance forums and digital trade negotiations, that history should not repeat itself. Indian officials co-chaired the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 alongside France, and India is scheduled to host the next iteration — a diplomatic signal that New Delhi intends to be a co-author of AI governance norms, not a late signatory.
An Indian chair at the ICC translates that diplomatic posture into institutional machinery. ICC working groups draft the standards documents that governments then adopt. Influence over the drafting stage is worth more than influence over the adoption stage — it determines which assumptions are baked into the architecture before any government votes on it.
The Contradiction India Must Resolve
The strategic opportunity is real. So is the internal contradiction that limits it. India has not adopted a comprehensive binding position in the WTO's e-commerce negotiations, deliberately preserving policy space on data localisation under the framework established by its data protection legislation. That ambiguity is defensible as a negotiating posture when India is a rule-taker. It becomes a liability when India occupies the chair that writes the first draft.
The tension is not hypothetical. India has invested significantly in building digital public infrastructure — payment rails, identity systems, open commerce networks — that it now actively seeks to export as a model for other developing economies. That export ambition requires interoperability with global standards. But global standards on cross-border data flows often presuppose free movement of data across jurisdictions — precisely the question India has not answered domestically. You cannot credibly pitch your digital architecture as a global template while simultaneously maintaining that its data governance rules are still being determined at home.
Analysts at institutions like the Takshashila Institution and ORF have made this point in different registers for several years. The G20 New Delhi Declaration's language on digital public infrastructure was a diplomatic achievement — it established the concept as a legitimate policy category in multilateral vocabulary. But a concept in a summit declaration and a codified position in a trade negotiation are not the same thing. Singhania's chairmanship compresses the timeline for resolving that gap, because the ICC's Digital Standards Initiative is the mechanism through which summit language becomes operational rule.
What the Moment Demands
The practical question for Indian policymakers is not whether to celebrate Singhania's elevation — it is how to convert institutional access into durable standards advantage. ICC working groups are where the detailed architecture of digital trade gets written: which data fields are mandatory, which authentication protocols are recognised, which AI transparency requirements attach to automated trade decisions. India's IT services sector, its fintech exporters, and its data-processing industries all operate at the intersection of these technical choices. Fragmented global digital trade rules, as NASSCOM has noted in various industry contexts, impose asymmetric compliance costs on Indian exporters who must navigate multiple incompatible regimes simultaneously.
The productive use of Singhania's two-year tenure is therefore not primarily a foreign policy project — it is a domestic policy project with an external deadline. India needs to clarify its own AI regulatory framework, firm up its position on cross-border data flows, and direct its engagement in ICC working groups toward standards that accommodate diverse data governance models rather than mandating the free-flow architecture that Western platform economies prefer. The Voice of Global South has built the political coalition. The ICC working group is where the coalition's preferences need to appear as technical text.
India has spent a decade arguing, credibly and persistently, that the rules of the digital economy should not be written solely by those who built the first generation of digital platforms. That argument now comes with institutional weight behind it. Whether the weight is used, or merely carried, is a choice that will be visible in the standards documents published before Singhania's term ends.
