BharatGen: India’s AI Manhattan project

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi, standing on the ramparts of the Red Fort, delivered his longest ever Independence Day speech, it was more than geopolitics on his mind.

- SHASHI SHEKHAR VEMPATI

His call to action for self-reliance in technology through innovation had, at its heart, an earthy understanding of the unique path India has treaded over the decades. Every few decades, whenever India has faced a choice about technology, we have refused to take the long road. When much of the world was busy laying copper wires for landlines, we jumped straight to mobile phones. When credit cards were still being mailed to Americans, Indians were already scanning QR codes at roadside stalls. Aadhaar, too, wasn’t designed for the urban elite; it was rolled out in villages, making the world’s largest biometric identity system a daily reality for the poor before it was convenient for the privileged.

This instinct to leapfrog, to diffuse technology in ways no one expects, is in India’s DNA, and it is this instinct that informed the Prime Minister’s speech and the various technology missions, from Quantum to Artificial Intelligence. With the AI revolution reshaping economies and redrawing the map of power, the question for India is not whether we will build AI but whether we will build it differently.