The Government of India’s vision and roadmap to make the current decade a “Techade for India” will play a crucial role in shaping the country’s future. However, when it comes to investing in futuristic technologies, India has been lagging if one were to compare with advanced countries like the United States and, more recently, our large northern neighbour China. In 2024, the Chinese government spent approximately 1.15 trillion yuan (around $160 billion USD) on science and technology, including both government-funded R&D and public expenditure. This robust government support – through investments, subsidies, and R&D infrastructure – along with cross-functional collaborations, has propelled technological advancement in leading countries, something India should emulate to become a fountainhead for new and breakthrough technologies.
India’s renewed commitment to invest in advanced technologies like quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and green hydrogen is exactly what the country needs to achieve its long-term goals, including becoming a developed nation by 2047 and reaching the Net Zero target by 2070. Building globally competitive capabilities in quantum computing will have huge impact on vital areas like communication, healthcare (particularly drug discovery), finance, and energy, and even national security and cybersecurity. Our ability to build superior AI models, given how data-rich India is, can dramatically improve the lives of millions across all strata of society. We are already witnessing how AI helps in improving agricultural productivity that makes the promise of doubling farmers income a more plausible reality in the near future. Given the diversity of our agricultural sector, the solutions we build here can become an important tool to even achieve global food security.
What is emerging clearer by each passing day is the value of these technologies and how critical they are in securing our future. The two questions that remain are: how do we get there and how fast can we do it?
India’s technology ecosystem is quite large, both in terms of scale and depth. Just to give a peek into this: we produce a million and half engineers every year and the number of IITs has also grown significantly in recent years. We export some of the best tech executives (not just CEOs!) to the West and the rest of the world. Indian Space Research Organisation is a jewel in our crown, serving the nation in ways only few institutions can match.
While there is no doubt about our domestic capabilities in technology, we should also be thinking bigger and broader. In an increasingly globalised and multipolar world and given India’s growing economic stature, we should expand our willingness and efforts to collaborate across institutional and national boundaries. Collaboration for technological advancements offers diversity, scale and capital that is rare to come by when working in isolation. To use the cliché, one plus one equals eleven.
In today’s digital era, with so many tech start-ups popping up all over the world, collaboration for technological development is a lot easier than it used to be. The recent long-term collaboration between Bharti Airtel and Google Cloud to deliver cutting-edge cloud solutions to Indian businesses is a prime example of how organisations can leverage each other’s strengths to achieve mutual goals. Similarly, Tata Steel is collaborating with Imperial College, London to build a Centre for Innovation in Sustainable Design and Manufacturing and with The Henry Royce Institute, Manchester for a Centre for Innovation in Advanced Materials. Our startup engagement arm, Innoventure, has conducted proof-of-concept experiments and pilots with over 40 Indian and global start-ups, aiming to discover breakthrough solutions for sustainability and other challenges along the value chain.
Our own experience from such collaborative efforts tells us how far we can go when the engagement happens at a national and global level between governments, academia and corporations. While countries and companies do compete for economic supremacy and leadership, it should not become the reason to work in isolation. Besides economic reasons, long-term challenges like climate change and the big sustainability question in everything we do can be achieved by collaborations. And the best of all reasons, it brings people from diverse backgrounds come together and find solutions for some of our most pressing challenges that can be solved through technology.
