India's challenge: Building sovereign GenAI

It needs more than just ambition; attracting Indian researchers back to the country is just one of the hurdles

India needs to build sovereign AI, including sovereign generative AI (GenAI) capabilities. As this columnist has argued earlier, artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology, and depending on others for it could turn us into a techno-colony. For the fifth-largest economy in the world, aspiring to become the third-largest economy, not building sovereign capabilities in this critical technology would be a catastrophic mistake.

The Union government is fully cognizant of the need to build domestic AI capabilities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently spoken about an AI mission. In last year’s Budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioned three centres of