So where is India heading?

While the world is stunned at the Chinese AI breakthrough, when will India come out with a similar feat?

- Vikas Kuthiala

Not just tech, India has not produced a single world class brand in any sector or domain. Small nations like Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Scotland... have dozens of world class brands.

We seem to lack the capability, desire, vision or the ambition. How can we? Easy money to be made by extracting economic rent by selling mediocre products to captive consumers. Cronyism, regulatory capture, barriers to trade allows mediocrity to thrive.

In the 1960s when the Gulf region started to see a massive inflow of dollars, they were keen to build their infrastructure, and they turned to India. All our companies behaved so irresponsibly, unethically and shabbily that we lost their trust. We were eased out and replaced by Western contractors. And we were quite happy shipping our labour work force.