Debate, without Demonising
December 14, 2024
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(The article was originally published in Indian Express on December 14, 2024 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)
James Carville, the campaign strategist of Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential elections said, famously, “The economy, stupid”, a phrase that turned the tables on George H W Bush’s re-election and sent Clinton to the White House. Today, it should be “The technology, stupid”. The world has entered the era of frontier technologies, of tech haves and have-nots. The real race is no longer about shadowy GDP figures, which can be interpreted differently based on varied indices. For example, if you take the GDP in real terms, the US is ahead of China by at least $10 trillion. However, the GDP adjusted to purchasing power parity (PPP) will place China ahead of the US by about $4 trillion.
But the two countries are competing not just about those numbers. It is no longer the case that the country with the highest GDP would automatically dominate the world. In this era, five or six major technological advances would determine the global pecking order. Technologies like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing, genetic and biotechnology, clean-tech and space fall under this category of weapons of world domination in the 21st century.
Earlier this week, Google introduced a new quantum chip called “Willow”, which can “solve problems in under five minutes that would take ten septillion years for the world’s fastest supercomputer”. A septillion is a number equal to 1 followed by 24 zeros — a trillion trillions. In 2019, Google developed a processor called “Sycamore”, which made history by performing in just 200 seconds a task that would take a good supercomputer 10,000 years. The Willow processor chip has double the quantum bits (Qubits), making it revolutionary. When Sundar Pichai announced the development, it wowed tech leaders like Elon Musk.
India should take this technological challenge seriously. It has to tighten its belt to race ahead in all the frontier technology areas. Let me contextualise this challenge with some relevant data. Digital age computing saw the development of supercomputers and massive storage and processing machines in the 1960s. The first supercomputer, Cray, was developed in the US in 1964. We took 20 years to enter the race. When the US denied access to the technology, India decided to build its own. Vijay Bhatkar, the architect of supercomputing in India, built Param 8000 in 1991.
According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the first indigenously built supercomputer, Param Shivay, was installed only recently at the BHU in Varanasi. AIRAWAT — AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Assimilation program — is India’s best supercomputer thus far. But it is ranked 75th in the world in terms of computing capability.
Meanwhile, the world is moving to quantum technologies that are millions of times faster and more efficient than supercomputers. The entire future of AI and activities driven by it like genome technologies, space and clean-tech is dependent on quantum computing. India cannot wait for too long to plunge into this race, nor can it smugly assume that with advances in supercomputing, it is ahead of the curve.
Supercomputing has limited applicability in the new AI-driven world of quantum 2.0. That is why countries are investing heavily in quantum and other technologies. In 2022, China announced $15.3 billion for quantum technology, almost double the investment that EU nations made, and around five times that of the US.
Thanks to the visionary initiatives of the Modi government, India has also entered this race. The National Mission on Quantum Technologies & Applications was established in 2020 with a five-year budget outlay of about $1 billion. It is the seventh country to have a quantum mission. However, much needs to be done in terms of actual research and output. If we take the top 10 per cent of most cited papers on quantum technologies, India ranks 20th. On the patents front, too, India ranks ninth with around 340 patents in quantum technologies. China, with over 57 per cent of patents and the US with over 28 per cent lead the race.
Countries won’t have long gestation periods for progress. World history shows that the take-off happens due to visionary leadership and relentless pursuit in just 10-15 years. Franklin D Roosevelt gave such a boost to the US economy between 1933 and 1945 through his revolutionary New Deal. World War II helped the US build a strong military-industrial complex. Something similar unfolded in the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev. Deng Xiaoping’s era (1985-1995) witnessed China rising as the world’s manufacturing capital. Once they took off, the US and China continued their trajectory by investing in frontier areas — China through state funding and the US through private and public capital.
If India is to join this league, it needs a decade of leadership vision, and resource allocation jointly by public and private institutions. Can India achieve this? As I was finishing this article, the news that Gukesh Dommaraju — the 18-year-old chess prodigy from Tamil Nadu — defeated his Chinese challenger Ding Liren to become the world champion. India has the brain power needed to rise in the tech world. It has that 10-year window of visionary leadership too.
The last time that a digital revolution swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, India’s foremost IT entrepreneurs seized the opportunity. With a government leadership committed to taking the country forward in the frontier tech era, there is a huge opportunity for private and public institutions to leap forward. Sadly, though, we still don’t seem to realise that the real infrastructure spending needed in the 21st century is not just physical but AI infrastructure.
