Opinion | AI For All: Why India’s Next Strategic Leap Depends On Indigenous Innovation

Dr Anil Agrawal & Akash Mor

India’s AI progress relies on local innovation, with IndiaAI Mission, AI Kosh, chip manufacturing, and MediSim VR boosting growth and tech credibility.

India stands at an inflection point. Artificial Intelligence is no longer a laboratory ambition or a corporate efficiency tool. It is a sovereign capability, an economic multiplier and a strategic instrument that will define national competitiveness in the coming decades. The question before us is not whether India should lead in AI, but whether we will take the right steps at the right time to build durable, indigenous strength.

The Government’s approach to democratising technology through the IndiaAI Mission signals a structural shift. The motto of AI for All captures an essential truth. Artificial Intelligence must not remain confined to elite research clusters or a handful of large firms. It must solve real-world problems across agriculture, health, logistics, defence, governance and education. It must be human-centric, safe and inclusive.

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The Safe and Trusted AI pillar of the IndiaAI Mission is particularly significant. Bias mitigation, machine unlearning, privacy-preserving architectures, algorithm auditing tools, deepfake detection and risk assessment protocols are not regulatory afterthoughts. They are foundational to trust. Thirteen projects already selected under this pillar indicate that India recognises safety as an enabler of scale, not a constraint on innovation.

The AI Foundation Models pillar aims to build indigenous large language and multimodal models aligned with India’s linguistic and socio-economic diversity. This is strategically vital. Dependence on foreign foundational models risks embedding external cultural, economic and security biases into domestic systems. An India-trained model that understands regional languages, local governance data and rural economic patterns is not just a technical asset; it is a civilisational imperative.

AI Kosh, by enabling secure access to India-based datasets with strong governance safeguards, strengthens data sovereignty. Combined with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, India is laying down a robust legal architecture for lawful and secure data processing. This clarity reduces uncertainty for innovators and investors while protecting citizens.

The India AI Governance Guidelines provide a mature framework anchored in seven core principles including trust, fairness, accountability and safety. A risk-based governance approach is pragmatic. High-risk AI use cases in healthcare, finance, defence or public services must be subject to proportionate safeguards. The proposed AI Governance Group, Technology and Policy Expert Committee and an AI Safety Institute indicate that India is preparing institutional depth, not episodic oversight.

Equally transformative is India’s renewed push toward semiconductor manufacturing and advanced chip design. Artificial Intelligence ultimately runs on compute, and compute depends on chips. Under the India Semiconductor Mission, the Union Cabinet has approved a semiconductor manufacturing facility in Uttar Pradesh, a joint venture between HCL and Foxconn near Jewar International Airport, which will produce display driver chips for a range of devices and boost domestic chip production capacity. Indigenous chip production reduces strategic dependence on external supply chains, strengthens resilience against geopolitical disruptions, and enables optimisation of processors tailored for Indian AI workloads, including low-resource language models and edge deployments. When domestic AI research, secure cloud infrastructure and locally manufactured chips converge, India moves from being a consumer of global technology stacks to becoming an architect of its own digital future.

However, policy architecture alone will not deliver leadership. India must significantly expand long-horizon research and development. Strategic investment in AI research and development, particularly in core algorithms, semiconductor design, edge computing, high performance computing infrastructure and secure cloud ecosystems, is essential. Public funding should crowd in private capital, especially for deep tech start-ups building original intellectual property rather than incremental applications layered over foreign platforms.

Capacity building is moving in the right direction. Through IndiaAI FutureSkills, the Government is supporting 500 PhD fellows, 5,000 postgraduates and 8,000 undergraduates in AI. Twenty-seven IndiaAI Data and AI Labs have been established in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, with 543 ITIs and polytechnics approved for additional labs. More than 290 fellowships have been awarded so far. The FutureSkills PRIME programme, a collaboration between MeitY and NASSCOM, has already registered over 26 lakh candidates and trained more than 16 lakhs in emerging technologies. This distributed skilling architecture ensures that AI capacity is not metropolitan-centric.

Yet the next phase must move from talent consumption to talent creation. India must incentivise doctoral research, interdisciplinary AI labs within universities, defence AI collaborations, and industry academia consortia focused on mission-driven innovation. AI research grants should encourage work on explainable AI, energy-efficient models, federated learning and low-resource language models tailored for Indian contexts.

The deployment side is equally critical. Artificial Intelligence must be embedded in public service delivery, precision agriculture, climate modelling, predictive health diagnostics and logistics optimisation. In defence and strategic domains, AI-enabled decision support systems, autonomous systems and cyber resilience will shape national security outcomes. AI is not an IT upgrade. It is a force multiplier across sectors.

The private sector’s role is indispensable. Make in India firms are already demonstrating how indigenous innovation can align with national priorities. MediSim VR, for instance, is building advanced medical simulation technologies using AI and virtual reality to train healthcare professionals. In a country where clinical training capacity is often stretched, AI-driven immersive simulation offers scalable, cost-effective and high-fidelity learning. Such platforms reduce training variability, enhance patient safety and strengthen healthcare outcomes. MediSim VR exemplifies how deep tech enterprises can integrate AI into high-impact sectors while building globally competitive products.

India’s global imagery will increasingly depend on its technological credibility. Nations that shape AI standards, foundational models, compute architectures and safety protocols will shape the digital order. If India can combine scale, democratic governance, ethical safeguards, semiconductor capability and indigenous innovation, it can position itself as a trusted AI partner to the Global South and advanced economies alike.

Timing is crucial. Artificial Intelligence is advancing at exponential speed. Delayed investment today will translate into structural dependence tomorrow. The right regulatory clarity, the right fiscal incentives, the right research ecosystems, semiconductor capacity and the right industry partnerships must converge now.

Development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence technologies is not a slogan. It is a strategic agenda. If pursued with scientific rigour, institutional maturity and sustained investment in research and development, AI can become a pillar of India’s economic growth, social transformation and global stature. The opportunity is historic. The responsibility is collective.

Dr. Anil Agrawal is former Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, and Chancellor, HRIT University. Major Akash Mor (Retd) is a strategic management consultant. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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