The New Idea of India

Notes from three weeks across tech, business and policy. It is clearly their moment, and a moment of global re-ordering. But as is globally so, with warnings not far under the surface.

It may be an emblematic tale of our ever-unpredictable times that I was recently in India more broadly and Kashmir in particular just when India’s ascendancy on the world stage has seemed never greater.

For security reasons, I had no mobile or data access in Kashmir and there was an extensive military presence every other block in its capital Srinagar, I was assured that the region was never safer and more open for tourists. In fact, there were tens of thousands, mostly Indian, tourists wherever I went enjoying the magnificent history, culture, and mountain beauty of it all.

In my meetings with senior figures in government and business, Pakistan virtually never came up. People shrugged and as if to say there were just other priorities more important. One expert said to me, “We have four global concerns today: They are China, China, China and then keeping an eye on Pakistan.”

A week later, everything changed.

My three-week trip covered a lot of ground and included dozens of meetings with leaders across the intersection of policy, business and technology. My schedule across the country was anchored by an extraordinary Track 1.5 US-India-Europe Trilateral Forum hosted by The German Marshall Fund, sponsored by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. As with every gathering hosted by Managing Director Bonnie Glaser and Garima Mohan, Senior Fellow of their Indo Pacific Program, conversations were intimate, candid, and driven toward action.

I am out of the prediction business, and these tensions – as all our tensions – continue to buzz right below the surface. At the same time, one need not have a crystal ball or be an expert in South Asia to note that this is a giant on the move and across its society.

To a person, it is clear that the country wants to be viewed as a defining global partner. They are or have the potential to be a key relationship in any geography. They argue persuasively that their fundamentals of size, economic growth and talent – especially in tech – are strong enough to overcome substantial problems of infrastructure, employment and security. There is a consistent, almost serene, view of this period of “global disorder” – we live in a “tarriffied world” one friend quipped – that the best thing is to deal with the world as it is, not as one wishes to have it. One senior official cracked me up with a line I will definitely steal: “For decades India was about NAM – non-aligned. Today we are polyamorous.”

I took a goal of having multiple partners as a cautionary notice that new dynamics may be forming between India and China. In a fascinating, long podcast between Lex Fridman and Prime Minister Modi earlier this year, the leader was ecumenical underscoring the importance of dialogue and cooperation. Despite ongoing tension and historic mistrust escalated in the China’s border actions in 2020, it was clear that there was, as one minister told me, an “evolving road map toward normalization but not reset.” Astoundingly, while potentially about to resume, for five years there have been no direct flights between the two.

One executive told me, “Look, business in China is for China. One must start by understanding this for what it is.” What it is for one expert on the Indo Pacific was very blunt: “I have met no one inside or outside India who believes that Delhi's relations with China could return to the status quo ante prior to June 2020. India has resumed interactions with China, but distrust will persist, and the border will remain a hurdle to true "normalization."

Many of the business people I met agree. At one level, there was a sense here as I hear often in Europe and in Latin America a concern of the build up of reliance on China’s markets and both excellent and low-cost products. Over 60% of chips in India are made in China – not Taiwan despite equal or better capabilities there. At the same time, Tik Tok has been banned, there are significant restrictions on Huawei and pressures on Xiaomi phones, BYD is a minor player as compared to local maker Tata Motors, and affordable China cars like Cherry not apparent at all.

India is proud of their building steps for national security vis a vis China with America and acting the part of global players – from being the first on the ground to support Myanmar in its tragic earth quake last March to its leadership in the partnership US-Australia-Japan-India Quad where they will host the Summit in 2025. One senior American official noted that India understands it is less about being anti-China than about being for the rest of the world. “In soft power, India has much greater potential than China globally.” Another noted, “India wants to be unshackled from China.”

India understands that it does not have the money to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese but can work around it. Specific and deliberate plans, especially bi-lateral trade agreements, are in motion from the Gulf (as many as 40% of the population of UAE is of Indian descent), to Brazil. They are thinking creatively about a post bellum order evolving in Russia should there be successful peace negotiations. There has been “a march” of EU and individual European countries and companies coming to India in the past year with, as one economist noted, “a renewed emphasis and palpable urgency to move forward.” Japan, especially for infrastructure, is opening greater dialogue. As Veda Vaidyanathan of the Center for Social and Economic Progress shows in detail the opportunity across Africa in critical minerals could not be more essential for India’s ambitions economically and sustainably. In all this, India has shown great ability in navigating complex geopolitical shoals – having, say, a defense tech deal with Israel while having other trade with Iran.

The enthusiasm for doing business with America, and the recent meetings with President Trump in particular, could not be much greater. In a world of tariffs, and dozens of countries vying for attention in Washington India has leaned in early and is “far forward” in negotiations – with serious and detailed proposals for a free-trade agreement in motion and on the table if still being debated. There is no doubt that pressure on supply chains and global re-assessment of China plays to their advantage. In recent weeks Apple’s Tim Cook announced their intention to move all manufacturing of iPhones for America to India. (President Trump may have different ideas.) As one investor told me admiringly of India in all the uncertainty, “The stakes have never been higher to be calm.”

India’s recent tech history is legion and well documented and still a work in progress. Outside of America and China, no country has had more tech IPOs than India in the last five years, but not a few remain a struggle. Advanced tech startups remain fewer and far between. One VC told me of the last 250 companies funded, perhaps 10 are in quantum. They know they lag on mature chips and, again, are heavily reliant on China for less sophisticated chip requirements. At the same time, some years ago India had no fabs, now they have six with extensive design capability and better equipment end-to-end. One chip entrepreneur smiled at me and said, “Dying are the days when India makes ice cream and China does chips.”

Fabs are not great job creators – still one of the most vexing challenges for India. However, back-end (where China does over 40% of the supply chain) and ecosystem parts and chemical manufacturing can be. A senior executive at TSMC reminded me in Taiwan last year as I noted here that money and investment is important in a chip strategy – but the highest quality ecosystem around the fabs are essential.

I appeared to stump even VC’s I met when I asked will India have its own DeepSeek moment. China’s ability to play apparent catchup in what appears to be genuinely open, advanced large language models beyond expectations of what many in Silicon Valley and the West thought possible. Was the act of this surprise an encouragement to innovators in India? Will there be an India version?

The answers came with nearly a shrug and raised eyebrows. There was more focus on detailed and significant answers to the importance of AI, the need for increased GPUs, possible opportunities in the wide diversity of languages. But the focus appeared more on building the infrastructure and especially energy access to enable it in India, and the services it could unleash. In some respects, also, was a sense that the “DeepSeek” moment was about leap-frog innovation – and that might be found in space and energy. One CTO warned me, “It’s good that India’s tractor manufacturer is the third largest supplier to the US. But that might not be good enough for the 21^st century.”

They are deservedly proud of their efforts in Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which has created the most expansive platform and architecture for biometric and digital identity, real time mobile payments, secure cloud storage, and a series of APIs enabling paperless and cashless governance outside of China. They emphasize its openness as something that can be adopted by any other rising country and have had close discussions with Brazil whose Pix instant payments platform offered many lessons and potential for future co-authored innovation. Their ambition from this start is significant within India and beyond.

Weighing most significantly on opportunity is cumbersome regulation, as one CEO told me “If we do not deregulate we die.” Everyone had a story of some painful obstacle to getting things done. It is not that there hasn’t been debate at even the most practical level – will a tax code reflect opportunities to deployment of capital; will the Goods and Services Tax be made more efficient; can taxes be paid once a year rather than four times; can companies – especially tech innovators – fail easier and can investors more efficiently get their capital out.

It's that overall I found it nearly impossible to get clear answers on three focusing questions:

What current or new regulations most unleash leap frog innovation and how?

What current regulations well enforced require no new regulations?

What existing regulations killed would most drive growth?

I’m not sure many policy makers anywhere answer these well, but they are a good litmus test of how a growing nation is serious about taking its place in the 21^st century.

And yet there was also interesting discussion about shifts with three tail winds: the desire of the government to take its place as a leading global actor; the requirement, to that end, to take any ankle weights off of innovation especially around the massive energy requirements; and that regulatory reform was front and center in the February agreements between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi: Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology.

Most interesting to me, and I want to unpack in the coming months, is in the area of nuclear. I think Ashley Tellis of Carnegie summed it up well and I will quote at length:

“If Modi’s ambitions to make India a major semiconductor manufacturing center, a significant producer of green hydrogen, a generator of sophisticated indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) models, and an example of the benefits flowing from the large-scale shift toward electricity for transportation are to be realized—at a time when urbanization in India is rapidly increasing and climate change will increase the need for air conditioning dramatically—the Indian demand for increased quantities of reliable baseload power will only grow by leaps and bounds. In any event, India plans to increase the share of renewables in its energy basket substantially in the years to come. But because the energy that can be potentially sourced from renewables is currently estimated at no more than 1,000 GW, the balance—some 3,000 GW (or seven times the current installed capacity)—will have to derive from both fossil fuels and nuclear power, if India’s economic and climate mitigation goals are to be met by around mid-century.”

Of particular interest was discussion around Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) – innovative nuclear solutions, which top tech companies are exploring to deploy onsite to power their increasing power needs at data centers at lower risk and decidedly less burden on the environment. One attorney told me that there are regulations taking initial permitting down to three months – China like competitive – and small experiments may happen soon thereafter.

This blog and my experience and reflections focus primarily on the bottom-up – less the machinations of big government policy top down. And throughout my trip this was where I saw most hope across sectors.

I met a small young farmer in the Punjab who gave me a tutorial in the decades of top-down rules that required his grandfather and father to grow rice in lands not well suited for it in a region that doesn’t eat rice as a staple. Through his own gumption, analytics, taking graduate courses in agriculture decision making he will pivot his lands to fruit trees with an expectation to triple his income within three years.

I met many remarkable entrepreneurs like these “Drone Didis (sisters)” Bill Gates has recently written about – taking advantage of their entrepreneurial spirit but also a government program to train 15,000 young women in drone capabilities. The initial use will be in smart, data focused and green agricultural services like fertilizers. At the same time each woman knows they are building skills for the 21^st century and making new income as well.

I spent a day in the slums of Dharavi – a nearly two-million-person city of among the deepest poverty I’ve seen. Conditions are not significantly unchanged from when the great journalist Kate Boo chronicled her experiences in Annawadi in another part of Mumbai a decade ago in her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers. And yet I found, as she did, an energy to create something better there. My guide was a 22-year-old student, discovered by a teacher there and finishing a university degree in technology and about to start a master’s in AI. He will dedicate his life to using technology to help others find their paths there also.

As I wrote here about a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, nation’s often enter – by will or coincidence -- an era that they define as their time. It is something that can be felt at all levels, experiences, geographies and economic status. It is something that corruption, politicizing religion, and uneven access to opportunity will bury.

Nations don’t always grab these moments. No nation, as far as I can tell by my read of history, can capture them all.

Recent violence in India is a reminder of a moment’s fragility, and that time is rarely on the side of those who defer clear action and fail to deliver the goods.

This is India’s moment.

Time will tell.