AI & India: The Modi model of tech diffusion

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent podcast conversation with Lex Fridman, made a pithy comment that no matter what the world does with artificial intelligence (AI), it will be incomplete without India.

- SHASHI SHEKHAR VEMPATI

The comment was clearly directed at the race of sorts that has emerged between the United States and China for technological dominance this decade. As India charts its path to emerge as a developed scientific and technological power by 2047, a key determinant of success will be our ability to diffuse emerging technologies across the length and breadth of our society and harness their power to rapidly grow economic strength, expand state capacity and bolster institutional resilience.

India's historical trajectory in adopting new technologies has been anything but linear, smooth, and predictable.

From mobile telephony to cashless payments, our technological journey has been dotted by quantum leaps, skipping many intermediate transitions typical of the developed West. Since 2014, when Modi took office as Prime Minister, these quantum leapfrogs have had two defining characteristics, which merit deeper examination in the context of how technology diffusion has happened in India.

The first characteristic has to do with the creation of cloud-based public digital platforms that can be accessed over the public internet at a scale of a billion, aided largely by the absence of baggage associated with legacy technology systems. The second has to do with leadership by example that has spurred and motivated not only citizen adoption but, more importantly, an entire generation of technology entrepreneurs and a network of startups to develop applications and services around these public digital platforms.