India’s AI Mission is flying blind without technocrats |
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India’s AI Mission is flying blind without technocrats
While the rest of the world has converged on a model—technical judgement inside the institution, as a permanent organisational property—India remains a conspicuous and costly outlier.
In March 2024, India launched the IndiaAI Mission with an allocation of Rs 10,372 crore—roughly $1.25 billion—and an ambition to compete at the frontier of artificial intelligence. It was, by Indian standards, a serious commitment of resources. It was also, by the standards of every other serious technology nation, missing something fundamental.
From Washington to Seoul, from Tel Aviv to Beijing, governments that have decided to compete in frontier technology have made the same choice: Build institutions where technical judgement lives permanently—held by people who have actually done the work, with the authority to act on what they know. Not administrators. Not advisory committees. Not technical roles outsourced on contract to third parties. Operators with domain expertise, decision authority, and institutional permanence. DARPA was built on this principle. Israel’s National AI Directorate was built on this principle. Korea’s technology institutions were built on this principle. China’s AI governance structure, for all its differences, was built on this principle.
India has not made that choice. Not for the IndiaAI Mission. Not for the Atal Innovation Mission before it. Not for the decade of innovation initiatives in between. While the rest of the world has converged on a model—technical judgement inside the institution, as a permanent organisational property—India remains a conspicuous and costly outlier. In the AI race, the cost of that outlier status is no longer abstract.
Some will argue that a liberal democracy should leave frontier technology to the private sector—that government’s role is to set direction, not to do the work. It is a principled position. It is also one that no serious liberal democracy actually holds in practice when the stakes are high enough.
The argument here is not that government should take over AI—no successful model anywhere suggests that. The goal is more specific: The government needs the technical capacity to drive it. To make credible bets on where the frontier is moving. To evaluate outcomes with informed judgement rather than administrative process. To attract serious talent by signalling institutional seriousness. And critically, to activate the private sector—to provide the technical direction and validated pathways that give private capital the confidence to make serious frontier AI bets rather than safe, incremental, adoption-oriented ones. DARPA didn’t build the internet. It created the conditions under which the private sector could and did. That is the model. What distinguishes India is not its democratic values—it is the institutional gap that those values have been used to justify.
Also read: What South Korea’s KDI gets right that NITI Aayog never did
A pattern, not an exception
The Atal Innovation Mission, launched in 2016 under NITI Aayog, has built tinkering labs across thousands of schools and mentored millions of students. These are real outputs. They are also, by any serious measure of innovation—patents filed, products commercialised, frontier research produced—not what a country of India’s scale should be pointing to after a decade. Now a second iteration has been approved with a fresh budget, building on the same institutional architecture. The IndiaAI Mission followed the same template: Announce the ambition, allocate the budget, appoint a governance structure, and wait.
The National Quantum Mission, approved in April 2023 with a Rs 6,003 crore budget and reviewed by a committee of ministry secretaries chaired by a Minister of State, follows the same institutional template. So does the Atal Innovation Mission 2.0. The pattern runs across every frontier technology initiative India has launched in the past decade.
The numbers tell the same story. India’s parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology recently found that the IndiaAI Mission spent only 32 per cent of its allocated funds in FY 2025-26—and responded by cutting its FY 2026-27 budget by 50 per cent. Meanwhile, AI Curation Units—data management units to be placed across central........