2 months ago
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At India’s flagship AI acme successful New Delhi — attended by planetary CEOs and heads of authorities — a backstage assemblage was asked to permission the expo aft it emerged that a robot canine it showcased arsenic homegrown innovation was, successful fact, a commercially disposable Chinese merchandise worthy a fewer lakh rupees. The net turned it into a meme. But down the ridicule lies an uncomfortable information that deserves much than laughter: India, a federation with genuine ambitions, inactive struggles to showcase its existent strengths successful robotics and artificial intelligence.
Those strengths are real. In April 2025, a Mumbai schoolhouse squad became the archetypal Indians ever to triumph the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship successful Houston, shattering satellite scoring records. Months later, 5 government-school teenagers from Bengaluru — children of housekeepers and technicians, trained done Atal Tinkering Labs — built a robot from scratch and represented India astatine the FIRST Global Challenge successful Panama. Indian students tin innovate astatine a precise young age, and erstwhile fixed adjacent humble support, they vie with the champion successful the world. But here’s the signifier that should interest us.
In 2019, Kings United, a creation unit from Nalasopara — a working-class suburb connected Mumbai’s fringes — won NBC’s World of Dance with a cleanable people of 100, taking location a cardinal dollars. While authorities institutions similar the Sangeet Natak Akademi nurture classical and people forms, determination is nary comparable organization pipeline for the thoroughfare creation question that produced Kings United. Their academy successful Vasai was self-funded. India celebrated, posted clips, moved on. Robotics is astatine the aforesaid inflection point: spectacular wins that hazard ne'er becoming concern capability.
The world, meanwhile, is moving fast. ABB sold its robotics part to SoftBank past October for $5.375 billion, conceding the aboriginal belongs to AI-native systems. The quality furniture — Vision-Language-Action Models that fto robots perceive, reason, and enactment — is concentrated successful occidental hands: Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic. China counters with 35% of planetary robotics patents and state-backed information infrastructure astatine breathtaking standard — Beijing’s humanoid robot grooming centre spans implicit 10,000 quadrate metres, and Hubei’s installation generates implicit a cardinal real-machine information points a year.
India, with 1.6% of planetary patents and 70–95% import dependency connected halfway components, is squeezed connected some flanks: China’s uncommon world export controls successful 2025 showed however proviso attraction tin beryllium weaponised overnight, portion spot restrictions constrain entree to precocious AI processors. NVIDIA and Dassault Systems person already partnered to physique “Industry World Models” — physics-grounded AI simulating factories and cause molecules earlier they’re built. Physical AI is becoming infrastructure. India’s lack is conspicuous.
So, what would it instrumentality to person school-lab brilliance into a defensible nationalist position? The reply begins, possibly counterintuitively, not with factories oregon PLI schemes but successful classrooms — and not with a vague mandate to thatch coding. It requires a cautiously scaffolded robotics curriculum, integrated into the Atal Innovation Mission and PM SHRI schoolhouse programmes, that builds progressively from a child’s archetypal brushwood with a sensor to deploying AI inference connected borderline hardware by the clip they decorativeness school. Kerala has already made robotics compulsory for Class 10. That’s the seed. What’s needed is simply a nationalist model that makes the progression intentional. AICTE’s exemplary program for robotics and AI already exists connected paper. It needs funding, infrastructure, and enforcement.
But here’s the twist that makes this much than an acquisition story: each of this indispensable tally connected Indian-made robots and simulators. An “Academic Robotics Procurement specification” specifying home value-add criteria, supported by Robotics-as-a-Service models to easiness superior costs for institutions, would execute 2 things astatine once. It creates a guaranteed marketplace for Indian robotics manufacturers, de-risking their concern successful production. And it generates sovereign grooming data. Every robot limb that moves successful an IIT lab, each mobile level navigating an ITI corridor, each imaginativeness strategy classifying objects successful a polytechnic store produces multimodal information — visual, kinematic, tactile — capturing the textures of Indian operating environments. A distributed, standardised installed basal crossed probe institutions tin make the information pipeline India needs to bid its ain instauration models for Physical AI. Without it, India’s robots volition tally connected overseas AI, trained connected overseas data, encoding overseas assumptions astir Indian factories, hospitals, and farms.
The manufacturing ecosystem needs arsenic deliberate architecture. India needs 2 to 3 dedicated Robotics Parks — not generic SEZs, but curated innovation ecosystems modelled connected Odense successful Denmark and the Pittsburgh Robotics Network — with shared prototyping labs, PCB fabrication facilities, optics cleanrooms, EMC investigating chambers, BIS-aligned certification centres, and accomplishment academies. Targeted PLI schemes indispensable spell beyond a vague robotics statement to incentivise the circumstantial high-dependency components wherever India’s 70–95% import reliance is astir dangerous: LiDAR modules, harmonic gearboxes, servo motors, borderline AI processors, centrifugal controllers — with higher multipliers for units wrong Robotics Parks and MSME-friendly thresholds.
India presently has nary indigenous investigating installation for robots; machines indispensable beryllium shipped overseas for compliance. Accelerating BIS robotics standards and gathering home certification centres is foundational. And to springiness each this demand-side pull, a National Robotics Demand Aggregator — modelled connected EESL’s transformative enactment with LEDs and CESL with electrical vehicles — should excavation procurement from Railways, Defence, PSUs, and authorities governments. A people of 50% Indian-made procurement successful nationalist robotics projects by 2030, backed by a dedicated multi-billion dollar R&D and deployment fund, would awesome that India is serious.
By 2050, India volition location 346 cardinal elder citizens: Japan’s effect to a akin demographic displacement included implicit $740 cardinal successful robotics R&D. The planetary robotics marketplace is headed towards $160–260 cardinal by 2030. Physical AI is expanding into satellite models that volition reshape however nations plan medicines, tally factories, and physique cities. India has the demographic imperative and the engineering talent. Two schoolhouse teams from Mumbai proved it successful Houston. Five government-school kids proved it successful Panama. A creation unit from Nalasopara proved it connected the biggest signifier successful the world. What India needs present is to marshal this endowment — springiness it the close program from property ten, the close tools from Indian manufacturers, the close information from Indian robots, and the close argumentation architecture to crook sparks into a fire. The signifier won’t physique itself. But the builders are already here.
(The writer is an Energy and Emerging Technologies expert.)
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