India’s Quantum Dreams

In February 2020 – long before the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged economies, including India’s – the Indian government announced its decision to spend $1.12 billion over the next five years on the development of quantum technologies, a figure comparable to the United States’ 2018 financial commitment to quantum tech research. India has a long tradition of excellence in theoretical physics, including in quantum physics. So in many ways, the decision was logically sound as New Delhi looked to leverage that talent base for technological gains, cognizant of the spectacular advances neighbor and frenemy China has made in quantum information science. In recent years China has leapfrogged in quantum tech, including in developing new quantum encryption solutions that could – as the hope goes – someday lead to a “unhackable” internet and translate into a significant military edge for the country. 

Given the damage the pandemic has done to India’s economy, it is not clear whether the Indian government will be able to stick to its quantum tech spending pledge. The Indian economy is in an unprecedented recession. While the economy has shown modest signs of recovery in the past couple of months, India’s economic trajectory – and therefore, the fate of federal spending plans – remains unknown at the present. The prospects for non-essential spending are bleak. 

However, India’s February quantum announcement, along with New Delhi’s ambitious plans to shape global tech norms, draws attention to the extant state of the ecosystem around, and culture of, innovation in the country. Without a critical look at both, neither large government spending commitments nor norm entrepreneurship is likely to take New Delhi where it wants to go when it comes to disruptive and emerging tech.

On the surface, India looks perfectly poised to become a global leader in tech innovation, given its large base of English-speaking credentialed scientists and technologists, a significant domestic market, as well as many state-subsidized research organizations. But scratch that surface and a different picture emerges. 

India ranked 48th in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s 2020 Global Innovation Index. It spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on R&D efforts. One 2019 report found that more than 80 percent of Indian engineers were “unemployable” with only 3.84 percent of them possessing skills to work in software tech start-ups. In 2020, India ranked 40th among 53 on a global intellectual property index released by the Global Innovation Policy Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the Dominican Republic, Greece, and the Philippines ranking higher. The best Indian technology school – the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay – ranked 172nd in the 2020 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world university rankings; no other Indian university did better than that. Other such statistics abound.

But as loudly as these numbers speak for themselves, the problem when it comes to India and innovation is deeper and revolves around a risk-averse culture that does not tolerate failure, the precise condition needed for innovation to flourish. A 2017 study by the IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics discovered that 90 percent of Indian startups don’t last five years for a variety of reasons, including lack of concrete business models and trained staff. 

In a still per capita poor country like India, an engineering education is often seen as a sure shot to upward economic mobility, which in turn rests on steady paychecks. Every Indian startup that fails effectively serves as a warning lesson for young Indian technologists who may be contemplating that route. The net effect of this dynamics is that a sizeable fraction of India’s technical pool, in search of financial and social respectability, end up gravitating toward large Indian companies that offer routine technical services to others as back-end support, services that are now at the real risk of being rendered obsolete with the rise of artificial intelligence.

A related factor at play is the state of scientific research in India and the country’s once storied research institutes and universities. While a handful of Indian scientists working in India are indeed global leaders, and the facilities that support them are stellar, a large fraction of India’s scientific and technical research organizations are moribund. The Indian educational system has long misprioritized rote learning of obsolete syllabi; when problem-solving skills, in areas such as mathematics, have found a place of importance in the curriculum, they often revolve around set “tricks” and templates. All of this leaves students entering the workforce entirely unprepared for challenges ahead at the workplace and the lab.

In the past couple of years, the Indian foreign policy and strategic establishment has tried to position the country as a leader in disruptive tech norm-making. India is a member of the Australia-led Quad tech initiative which, among other things, seeks to set ethical standards for new technologies. New Delhi is also a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence launched in June 2020; the partnership revolves around AI standards and norm-making. The Indian foreign ministry launched a separate New, Emerging and Strategic Technologies Division in January 2020. And, on paper, the Narendra Modi government’s “Make in India” and “Self-Reliant India” campaigns front-and-centers tech innovation.

However, all this enthusiasm around global technology leadership is likely to ring hollow if India’s tech heft does not grow significantly, measured in terms of performance along globally accepted metrics. And for that to happen, nothing less than a social and educational revolution will suffice.