INDIA’S QUANTUM MOONSHOT

QUANTUM COMPUTING MAY BE YEARS AWAY FROM LARGE-SCALE DEPLOYMENT, BUT CAN INDIA SECURE A PLACE IN THE SUN?

- BY NIDHI SINGAL

FOR DECADES, we’ve been told that the secret to digital safety is complexity. Add uppercase letters. Throw in numbers. Sprinkle special characters like #, %, and &. The more random the password looks, the safer your bank account, email, and identity supposedly become.

In classical computing, this logic has held firm. Modern encryption is protected by mathematics so vast that even the world’s fastest supercomputers would need billions, sometimes trillions, of years to crack it. Our financial systems, military communications, cryptocurrencies, and even WhatsApp messages rest on one assumption: that the math is too hard and the clock will run out before hackers ever succeed.

But the foundations of that digital trust are beginning to shift.

An emerging generation of machines—quantum computers—does not play by the rules of conventional computing. If a traditional computer is like a locksmith testing one key at a time, a quantum computer can explore countless possibilities simultaneously. Problems that would take today’s most powerful computers thousands of years could, in theory, be solved in hours or minutes. In that world, the strength of passwords may no longer matter.