Govt has no role in ai leadership
All they can do is protect data
And that is India’s biggest failing
India’s IT services revenue grew with headcount. The focus was capacity rather than capability. India had no technology. It merely provided people. Few realise that IT companies have no role in the quest for ai leadership. IT services is a different business. It has zero overlap with ai hardware or models or capabilities.
TCS or Tech Mahindra or Infosys are not going to lead Ai. They will be destroyed by Ai.
Data plays a decisive role. AI is not just about writing algorithms; it is about continuous learning from large, coherent data streams. China developed massive, unified consumer platforms such as WeChat, Alibaba, Baidu, and later TikTok, where deployment, observation, and retraining could happen in tight feedback loops.
India on the other hand allowed big tech to rule over its market and thwart local players. An absolutely corrupt and thoroughly incompetent judiciary helped foreign players flout all regulations.
Google pay said it was not a fintech company. Amazon claims it is not a retailer. Big4 claim they don’t do audit in India.
Incompetent corrupt bankers sold financial data for peanuts in bribes. Today a leading govt banks entire database of bank statements of all deposit holders is supposedly available to foreigners. An account holder cannot get his own ten year old account statement.
Hardware also mattered more than India anticipated. India’s IT leadership was almost entirely software-centric and increasingly abstracted away from physical systems. China invested heavily in chips, sensors, robotics, edge devices, and manufacturing ecosystems. Modern AI is inseparable from hardware and physical deployment. By missing the hardware leg, India limited how far its AI ambitions could realistically go.
Risk culture amplified these effects. In India, failure often carried lasting career impacts. Services firms, which dominated the ecosystem, rewarded predictability and punished deviation. In China, failure was more tolerable when aligned with national or strategic goals, and a scale-first, optimise-later mindset prevailed.
To leverage the full potential of ai, the India. govt has just one role. It has to prevent foreign companies from accessing or stealing Indian data. Second it has to ensure that corrupt and incompetent judges – the hallmark of India’s failed legal system do not give pro Big Tech judgements. One of the Big Tech players is supposed to have paid out Rs 1200 crores in legal fees. What services were being provided for such fees ?
There is no third role for the government in ai. Govt grants, fund of funds etc are all great. But these will not make Bharat great again.
Only technology will.
And that is the role of technologists. A lot depends on the IIT alumni. They have the expertise and the capital. To beat the hell out of China is a non-issue for this group.
But why will they ???
#217
2026