By Abhishek Lodha, MD & CEO, Lodha Group
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 feedback, and personalised curricula are no longer science fiction. With serious deployment, India could see meaningful gains in foundational literacy, numeracy, and scientific thinking within a generation.
Or consider government services. India’s growth has long been constrained by administrative bandwidth. AI layered onto the country’s already impressive digital public infrastructure could improve service delivery, reduce discretion, speed up approvals, and raise productivity across the state. A more capable government is not a technocratic luxury. It is a prerequisite for sustained growth.
Judicial delay presents an even clearer case. India’s backlog of over 47 million cases, according to the National Judicial Data Grid, is not only a justice issue but an economic one. Weak contract enforcement raises the cost of capital and discourages enterprise. AI systems can be deployed to summarise filings, analyse precedents, and support judges with structured recommendations. Decisions would remain human. But timelines could compress from years to months. Few reforms would have a comparable impact on India’s investment climate.
Some countries are already moving in this direction. Estonia, a small nation but a sophisticated digital state, is piloting AI tools to assist judges with case summaries and legal research, and deploying AI agents across government to handle citizen queries and routine administrative tasks. India, with its scale and talent pool, could achieve far more ambitious outcomes—if it chooses to.
The defence dimension is equally stark. China already enjoys a substantial lead in AI compute, military integration, and software depth. As warfare becomes increasingly autonomous, geography alone will not guarantee security. A nation without indigenous AI capability will face growing vulnerabilities, regardless of troop strength or terrain.
The risks of inaction extend beyond geopolitics. AI-driven automation is likely to disrupt significant segments of white-collar work globally over the next decade. Productivity gains will accrue disproportionately to firms that own the technology, most of which are foreign. India’s outsourcing industry faces structural disruption. Overseas professional pathways may narrow. Without domestic AI capability, India risks absorbing the disruption while exporting the value.
Ironically, India already plays a major role in the global AI ecosystem without capturing its upside. Indian users constitute one of the largest populations engaging with global AI platforms, contributing substantial interaction data and usage value. That phase of heavily subsidised access will not last. As dependency grows, pricing power will consolidate in a handful of firms abroad.
The choice, therefore, is not whether India adopts AI, but whether it does so as a sovereign shaper or a dependent user.
What would a serious national response look like?
First, India needs ambition rather than incrementalism: a focused national AI programme with clear authority, measurable outcomes, and direct reporting to the Prime Minister. It should bring together the best minds from the public and private sectors, from within India and the diaspora. Call it Mission Saraswati: a mission to place knowledge, intelligence, and learning at the heart of India’s state capacity.
Second, strategic public investment is unavoidable. Even with the demand unleashed by the government’s embrace of AI in the areas suggested above, private enterprise alone will not build sovereign AI infrastructure within the timelines India requires. A five-year, $100-billion sovereign investment programme—roughly 0.5% of GDP annually—could catalyse several times that amount in private capital. Deployed through equity and debt rather than grants, this would support domestic compute infrastructure, semiconductor capacity, foundational model development, and sector-specific AI systems. This is not fiscal extravagance; it is strategic nation-building.
At the same time, India should actively focus on attracting global capital in large quantum by emphasising the growth unlocked through AI-enabled governance and ease of doing business, combined with its large, young population. This would strengthen the macroeconomic foundation for long-term investment across job-creating sectors. This approach—blending state capacity with respect for capital and private execution—can be understood as Laxmi Pujan: not ritual symbolism, but disciplined national capital mobilisation and deployment.
Third, this is not only a technological shift. It is a cultural one. India must consciously move from improvisation to excellence: From jugaad to systems. From patchwork to precision. Infrastructure alone will not suffice if standards, institutions, and execution remain weak. A sustained cultural commitment to excellence is as essential as funding.
None of this diminishes the need for serious safeguards around privacy, bias, accountability, and democratic oversight. AI governance must evolve alongside AI deployment. But caution cannot become paralysis. Nations that hesitate will not shape the rules; they will inherit them.
This is when leadership matters. India today is led by a Prime Minister who has demonstrated unusual willingness to pursue long-term structural reform over short-term electoral convenience. If this political will is channelled toward a national AI mission, India will enjoy a rare alignment of technological opportunity and leadership capacity.
This is India’s railway moment. Seize it, and India can help shape the architecture of the next global order.