India’s Research Must Break Its Western Mold

For India to thrive, innovation must spring from its own needs rather than borrowed priorities.

India, like much of the world, has been jostled by the whiplash of American trade policy. Sweeping tariffs under Donald Trump reminded New Delhi of the fragility of global supply chains. The Indian government responded with self-reliance. The mantra of ‘Atmanirbharta’ has been grafted onto everything from chip manufacturing and artificial intelligence to space exploration and weapons systems. While these efforts are laudable, they are also derivative. For all the fanfare about a sovereign research and innovation ecosystem, India is still chasing the trains long since boarded by the West.

Deeper questions

It has missed the bus before. The country was a bystander as the semiconductor revolution reshaped economies, and again when the world moved from 2G to 3G. Today’s push into electric vehicles and AI risks repeating the same error: pouring scarce resources into domains dictated by others, not necessarily aligned with India’s own imperatives. To chart a truly self-reliant course, India must ask a deeper question: what kind of research reflects its demographic, cultural and economic realities?

Western priorities are shaped by conditions alien to India. Rich countries with high per-capita incomes, ageing populations and shrinking workforces seek to automate relentlessly. Their research reflects their anxieties: labour shortages, geopolitical dominance, and the ability to fund projects with decades-long gestation periods. India, by contrast, is young, populous and resource-constrained. Its challenges are of another order.

Consider literacy. India remains far from universal literacy, yet boasts one of the highest mobile- and internet-penetration rates in the world. A semi-literate farmer in Bihar may navigate a smartphone more easily than a book. Add to this the bewildering linguistic diversity of the country, where hundreds of languages jostle for space, and the opportunities for India-centric research become apparent. Machine translation, if designed with cultural nuance, could bridge linguistic divides. A search for a uniquely Indian lingua franca might sound fanciful, but so once did Google Translate.

India’s population profile also demands a very different approach to technology. Whereas German or Japanese firms build robots to replace workers, India’s goal should be to design products and services that create work. A telling example lies in manufacturing. Cars can be assembled by machines with minimal human input. But their servicing remains labour-intensive. With imaginative design, firms could amplify such human involvement rather than eliminate it.

The “use and throw” ethos of the West has saddled the world with waste. In India, products could be reimagined to offer novelty through services by refurbishing, upgrading and customising rather than constant replacement. A car, a sofa or a smartphone could be made to feel new not by discarding the old but by tweaking its appearance or performance. This would create work for semi-skilled labour, reduce environmental footprints and curb the lure of mindless consumption. A genuinely Indian innovation agenda would take this seriously.

Battling Brain-Rot

Another looming challenge is subtler but no less urgent: the erosion of cognitive fitness. “Brain rot,” Oxford’s word of the year in 2024, captures the malaise of overstimulation—too much social media, too many screens, too little critical thinking. For a nation banking on its “demographic dividend,” the risk is stark. An intelligent but distracted youth cohort could prove a liability.

India must innovate not only in classrooms but beyond them. Just as gyms and yoga studios emerged to counter sedentary lifestyles, there is scope for “brain gyms”—platforms, both physical and digital, that exercise memory, logic, and creativity. What sounds gimmicky could become a business in its own right, especially in cities. The state, meanwhile, can nudge educational institutions to build curricula that combat cognitive decline. Such thinking is more relevant to India’s long-term prospects than yet another incremental advance in chip design.

If India’s youth are its future, its past is no less valuable. Traditional knowledge, often dismissed as superstition, deserves a harder look. China offers an instructive example. In 2015, Youyou Tu won the Nobel Prize in medicine for isolating artemisinin, a compound derived from a herb mentioned in ancient Chinese texts, which revolutionised malaria treatment. That breakthrough was not blind traditionalism; it was the rigorous scientific testing of traditional knowledge.

India’s own experience shows the risks of neglecting this trove. In 1995 American researchers sought to patent the medicinal properties of turmeric, a staple of Indian home remedies. India fought the claim by citing traditional use and won. But defensive victories are not enough. The country must test, validate and commercialise its own heritage. Whether in Ayurveda, yoga, or ancient mathematics, India has rich veins of knowledge awaiting rediscovery.

India’s innovation discourse is filled with exhortations not to “miss the bus.” But the more important question is whether the country is chasing the right bus in the first place. Replicating Western priorities risks draining limited resources into projects that do little to solve India’s most pressing problems: literacy, jobs, waste, health and cognitive resilience. A research agenda rooted in India’s own soil, by contrast, could deliver both economic and social dividends.

That requires courage from policymakers, imagination from scientists and support from investors. It also requires a shift in mindset. It is time to stop measuring success by how closely India mimics Silicon Valley or Shenzhen and start defining it by how well research improves the lives of its own citizens.

The West’s research agenda reflects its circumstances. India’s must do the same. Only then can the country stop playing catch-up and start leading in fields that matter to it most.

(Author works in the Information Technology sector. Views personal)