The global damage to 'Make in India'

The AI Impact Summit, 2026 held in Delhi was a huge opportunity for India to project country's technical skills globally.

- Buroshiva Dasgupta

It was attended by the best of minds from Google, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and the India counterparts like Reliance/Jio. The French President Macron, who was on an India tour, briefly visited the Summit accompanied by the Indian Prime Minister. But alas! The event managers made such a big mess. The infamous traffic bottlenecks sent a wrong signal to the international visitors. To top it all, a private university from Uttar Pradesh, Galgotia, attempted to project a Chinese made AI robot as its own creation and did immense damage to the “Make in India” brand, which the country is now trying to market internationally. Indian talent, especially with the spread of information technology has been respected globally. In fact, most of the big IT companies in the world, now being transformed into AI giants, are headed by Indian borns. And yet, Indians have never been able to create any globally recognised ‘original’ hardware or software on Indian soil. One of the reasons of course is the government’s low priority on research and development (R&D). Recent data from the government’s Department of Science and Technology reveal that only 0.65% of GDP is spent on R&D, against 2.4%