Astra: AI Safety, Trust, & Risk Assessment

Abstract: This paper argues that existing global AI safety frameworks exhibit contextual blindness towards India's unique socio-technical landscape. With a population of 1.5 billion and a massive informal economy, India's AI integration faces specific challenges such as caste-based discrimination, linguistic exclusion of vernacular speakers, and infrastructure failures in low-connectivity rural zones, that are frequently overlooked by Western, market-centric narratives. We introduce ASTRA, an empirically grounded AI Safety Risk Database designed to categorize risks through a bottom-up, inductive process. Unlike general taxonomies, ASTRA defines AI Safety Risks specifically as hazards stemming from design flaws such as skewed training sets or lack of guardrails that can be mitigated through technical iteration or architectural changes. This framework employs a tripartite causal taxonomy to evaluate risks based on their implementation timing (development, deployment, or usage), the responsible entity (the system or the user), and the nature of the intent (unintentional vs. intentional). Central to the research is a domain-agnostic ontology that organizes 37 leaf-level risk classes into two primary meta-categories: Social Risks and Frontier/Socio-Structural Risks. By focusing initial efforts on the Education and Financial Lending sectors, the paper establishes a scalable foundation for a "living" regulatory utility intended to evolve alongside India's expanding AI ecosystem.