Lot has been said about India lagging behind in AI race. We need to also understand that America's AI dominance did not emerge from corporate generosity. DARPA funded the internet. DoD contracts built the semiconductor industry. NSF grants trained the researchers who eventually founded Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. America Inc is a decades long feedback loop between state capital and private risk-taking.
India has no equivalent chain, and the private sector must answer for that.
The companies that accumulated the most wealth from India's technology moment, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, built it almost entirely on labor arbitrage and service delivery. Their R&D expenditure as a share of revenue remains an embarrassment. These are not technology companies in any meaningful innovation sense. They are staffing operations at civilisational scale, billing hours to the same Western firms now restricting our access.
India's gross R&D spending sits at 0.7% of GDP. The US is at 3.5%. China crossed 2.4% and is accelerating. This is not a budget line problem waiting for government intervention. It is a structural incentive failure. When your margin comes from billing hours, there is no rational reason to invest in eliminating the hour.
The government cannot build its way out of a problem the private sector refuses to own. Until India's largest companies treat R&D as a strategic obligation rather than a cost center, every conversation about AI sovereignty will remain precisely that: a conversation.