We should not confuse India’s growth story so far with a taken-for-granted future – a young nation, a bloated workforce, and a thriving economy. Perhaps, in the spirit of the Vedic lessons, India’s policymakers must now rediscover the discipline śravaṇam, mananam, and nididhyāsanam – To listen, reflect and live with one’s own wisdom.
The first chapter of India’s global rise began during the era of liberalization with IT-based services and business process outsourcing. It has matured into knowledge process outsourcing and, today, to global capability centres. However, beneath this remarkable success lies an uncomfortable truth: that its economic value derives more from labor costs and currency arbitrage than from control of intellectual property.
At the same time, the world has moved from digitalization to augmented intelligence. The global production architecture is being revamped through artificial intelligence, automation and agentic workflows. Human-led services are quickly being replaced by human-AI co-creation, and the first AI delivery models will soon follow. If we cannot have what the world wants – and we will soon become addicted to it – we cannot claim superiority, as the giants of Western technology have shown.
But time is not on our side. The world’s major powers are racing forward to control the new industrial order.
The United States is building an artificial intelligence industrial backbone at a pace not seen since the Cold War. From massive data centers to on-shore chip manufacturing, from embodied robots to algorithmic thinking, they are restructuring the hardware and software of modern industry. Her AI race is all about context, perception, and control.
In contrast, China has linked power with production. It has built terawatt-sized power capacity, integrated robotics into its manufacturing lines, and created a design-to-volume pipeline unmatched anywhere. Its goal is not cost arbitrage, but complete sovereignty – from silicon to supply chains. Europe, stuck in its regulatory burden, and Japan, temporarily reawakening through smart production, are also beginning to reposition themselves.
If the last century was characterized by physical wars and the fever of globalization, this century will be characterized by digital wars, algorithmic power, and the competition for artificial intelligence supremacy. Theaters of conflict are shifting from borders to bandwidths, and from land to technology.
The future of jobs – and the jobs of the future – looks bleaker by the day. The nature of what constitutes “human work” is already changing radically. Countries will compete for control of data, design, and decision-making information. Multilateral institutions, whose moral and structural authority have already been eroded, risk further fading into irrelevance. Their paralysis already reveals a future in which sanctions and coercive regimes – economic, political or technological – may become new tools of global order (chaos).
Here lies India’s last chance – putting one foot in the old process economy and the other in the emerging intelligence economy. We are the third largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power. However, this does not mean much if material progress is not translated into the daily reality of all our people. We have a strong domestic market, a strong public digital infrastructure, and a demographic window that is still barely open.
Yet our growth structure is dangerously shallow. Private sector-led capital expenditures are tight, and investment in research and development remains largely low. We risk remaining the world’s dependable support function – efficient, reliable, and replaceable – rather than an indispensable leader.
Two-thirds of our population is under 35 years of age. This is our promise and our pressure. We owe them not just jobs, but dignity, purpose, and the opportunity to build a better India than the one they will inherit. Our major cities – the engines of our GDP – are unlivable for many, and yet, politically, we remain in denial.
Our approach to emerging technologies reveals a worrying pattern. Announcements about artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or groundbreaking technologies are frequent, but often half-baked. It addresses parts of the challenge—a funding window here, a grant there, a team somewhere—without a national vision that links industry, academia, and state capabilities into one coherent package. The sensationalist narrative in some quarters that the global AI party is over — happily shared through memes and snapshots — is not befitting of the Fixit Bharat journey.
Indian industry must also realize that Omar jugaad I finish. We cannot improvise our way to the front lines of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This reset must start early, from the way our schools teach curiosity to the way our universities cultivate experimentation. It requires nothing less than a national reimagining – an industrial and artificial intelligence strategy for the next two decades. Along with greater sovereign capital, long-term domestic savings, catalytic domestic capital pools, sovereign participation, and pension-led innovation funds could fuel India’s next growth engine.
Manufacturing must expand in depth, not just in breadth. We need the size of China, the precision of Germany, and the automation of America. Energy must be affordable, logistics frictionless, and industrial corridors truly ready for business. For SMEs, regulation must become an enabler. Unless Indian states align their vision with a national focus, these aspirations will remain rhetorical.
The world we are entering is not a world of scarcity but of renewed abundance, where sustainability and artificial intelligence are no longer separate but rather close together. Productivity will no longer be measured by speed or scale, but by the quality of impact – on people, on the planet, and on the purpose that drives progress.
If India is to lead this transformation, it must adopt what we call the SAGE mindset – one that treats sustainability as a strategy, not a compliance; Makes AI-led productivity an integral part of every workflow; It enforces governance that values transparency and speed; It puts empathy at the heart of growth.
But before all that, we must confront what didn’t work. Our industrial policy remains a patchwork of incentives, not a national design for the future. Towards Vixit Bharat, we need to fix it.
Sridharan is a corporate consultant and author of Family and Dhanda. Haribhakti is an independent director on corporate boards
(Tags for translation)India’s Growth Story
