India has long been a skilled adapter of technology built elsewhere. It has taken global tools, localised them, scaled them, and delivered them cheaply. That ability has served the country well. But N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, argues it is no longer enough. The next decade will demand something harder: origination.
Chandrasekaran frames technological mastery not as an economic aspiration but as a condition of national survival. Writing in the Indian Express, he argues that a country's freedom in trade, security and diplomacy is increasingly determined by its position in critical technology value chains. For India, the question is no longer whether to innovate but whether it can afford not to.
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The argument rests on a clear-eyed diagnosis. India has built institutional architecture for innovation across Startup India, the Atal Tinkering Labs, BIRAC and the India AI Mission, and its higher education system is producing deep-tech talent at scale. The first decade was about building the runway. The next must be about mastery: reducing global dependencies, entering critical value chains with strength, and improving lives at scale.
Chandrasekaran identifies the most important frontier as origination, which means owning critical intellectual property, controlling supply-chain chokepoints, setting standards and building platforms that others adopt.
"The next frontier is origination: owning critical IP, controlling supply-chain chokepoints, building component depth, setting standards, and creating platforms that others build upon," he writes.
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In every priority sector, the questions he poses are pointed: do we own the science, the design, the data, the manufacturing processes, the standards, the customer access? These are not rhetorical. They are the test India must clear.
Chandrasekaran is equally clear-eyed about the risks. Artificial intelligence can compress decades of progress in diagnostics and governance, but deployed without care, it can amplify bias and deepen inequality. The transition to technology-led growth must be managed with deliberate skilling and redeployment programmes so that India does not trade one vulnerability for another.
On the strategic rationale, he is direct: "India's goal is to identify the domains where the world cannot easily operate without us. For this, we need to concentrate innovation energy."
The piece also pitches Bharat Innovates 2026, a collaboration platform connecting Indian startups and research institutions with global investors and corporates. But the larger ambition runs well beyond any single initiative. For a country that has spent decades proving it can run the world's technology, the harder and more urgent task is building it.
from NDTV News- Special https://ift.tt/Rv7YsqO