December 14, 2024 07:00 IST
First published: December 14, 2024 at 07:00 IST
In the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, said the phrase “the economy, stupid” helped re-elect George HW Bush and send Clinton to the White House. Today, it should be “technology, stupid”. The world has entered the age of frontier technology, technology has and has-not. The real race is no longer about shady GDP figures, which can be interpreted differently based on different indicators. For example, if you take GDP in real terms, the US is ahead of China by at least $10 trillion. However, GDP adjusted at purchasing power parity (PPP) would put China about $4 trillion ahead of the US.
But the two countries don’t just compete on those numbers. It is no longer the case that the country with the highest GDP automatically dominates the world. In this era, five or six major technological developments will determine the global pecking order. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing, genetic and biotechnology, clean-tech and space fall into this category of weapons of world domination in the 21st century.
Earlier this week, Google unveiled a new quantum chip called “Willow”, which “can solve problems in 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 – one trillion trillion. In 2019, Google developed a processor called “Sycamore”, which made history by doing a task that would take a good supercomputer 10,000 years in just 200 seconds. The Willow processor chip has twice as many quantum bits (Qubits), making it revolutionary. When Sundar Pichai announced the development, it shocked tech leaders like Elon Musk.
India must take this technological challenge seriously. It needs to tighten its belt to move forward in all frontier technology areas. Let me contextualize this challenge with some relevant data. Digital age computing saw the development of supercomputers and large storage and processing machines in the 1960s. The first supercomputer, Cray, was developed in the US in 1964. It took us 20 years to enter the race. After the US denied access to the technology, India decided to build its own. Vijay Bhatkar, the architect of supercomputing in India, built the Param 8000 in 1991.
According to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the first indigenously built supercomputer, Param Shiva, was recently installed at BHU in Varanasi. AIRAWAT – the AI Research, Analytics and Knowledge Assimilation Program – is India’s best supercomputer to date. But in terms of computing power, it ranks 75th in the world.
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 the activities it drives, such as genome technology, space and clean-tech, depends on quantum computing. India cannot wait too long to jump into this race, nor can it be assumed that it is ahead of the curve with advances in supercomputing.
Quantum 2.0 of supercomputing has limited applicability in the new AI-driven world. That is why countries are investing heavily in quantum and other technologies. In 2022, China announced 15.3 billion dollars for quantum technology, which is almost double the investment made by EU countries, and about five times that of the US.
Due to the visionary initiative of the Modi government, India has also entered this race. The National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications was established in 2020 with a five-year budget outlay of approximately $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 percent of most cited papers on quantum technologies, India ranks 20th. On the patent front as well, India ranks ninth with around 340 patents in quantum technologies. China leads the race with over 57 percent of patents and the US with over 28 percent.
Countries will not have a long gestation for progress. World history shows that take-off occurs in 10-15 years due to visionary leadership and tireless efforts. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave such a boost to the American economy between 1933 and 1945 through his revolutionary New Deal. World War II helped America build a strong military-industrial complex. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev. The era of Deng Xiaoping (1985-1995) saw China emerge as the manufacturing capital of the world. Once they took off, the U.S. and China continued their path by investing in the border region—China through state funds and the U.S. through private and public capital.
If India wants to join this league, it needs a decade-long vision of leadership, and a joint allocation of resources by public and private institutions. Can India achieve this? As I was finishing this article, news broke that Gukesh Dommaraju, an 18-year-old chess player from Tamil Nadu, had defeated his Chinese rival Ding Liren to become the world champion. India has the brain power needed to rise in the tech world. It also has a 10-year window of visionary leadership.
The last time India’s leading IT entrepreneurs seized the opportunity was in the 1980s and 1990s, when the digital revolution took the world by surprise. There is a great opportunity for private and public institutions to move forward under the leadership of a government that is committed to moving the country forward in the technological age. But sadly, we still don’t understand that the real infrastructure spending needed in the 21st century is not just physical infrastructure, but AI infrastructure.
Author, Chairman, Bharat Foundation, is with BJP. Views are personal
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