India’s AI railway moment |
Artificial intelligence will shape the 21st century much as steam power, railways, electricity, and the telegraph shaped the 19th. Those technologies reordered global power, transformed economies, and elevated nations that mastered them. Britain rode them to empire; the US built institutions around them to emerge as the dominant global power. The world we inhabit today is their inheritance.
AI is that kind of technology. And for India, the stakes are civilisational.
This is not merely a debate about apps or efficiency. It is a question of sovereignty. If India does not own its AI compute, its foundational models, and its deployment architecture, it will become structurally dependent on foreign intelligence systems. Not colonised in the old sense, but constrained all the same. A nation that rents cognition cannot remain strategically autonomous for long.
India stands at a fork in the road. With decisive action over the next decade, it can emerge as one of the world’s three major AI powers, alongside the US and China. Without it, the country risks compounding economic, geopolitical, and social disadvantages.
That risk is no longer abstract. There is a growing perception in global capital markets that India lacks a coherent AI strategy, and that this absence could weaken its long-term competitiveness. But that is not destiny. What makes this moment unusual is that India’s developmental needs align almost perfectly with AI’s strengths.
Take education. India’s jobs challenge is fundamentally a skills challenge. Its roots lie in uneven teaching quality, large class sizes, and the lack of individual attention in early schooling. AI systems are uniquely suited to address this. One-on-one tutoring at national scale, adaptive learning aligned with the National Education Policy, continuous teacher........