Distinguished Fellow - NITI Aayog | Chief Architect – NITI Frontier Tech Hub | Former President - Nasscom | Former Vice President and MD – Intel South Asia
The deeper I dive into AI, the clearer it becomes that its most transformative impact will be on how science itself is done. For a country like India—where R&D spending still hovers below 0.7% of GDP, compared to over 2.5% in the U.S. and China—AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leapfrog decades of under-investment and accelerate discovery at unprecedented speed. This could be India’s golden opportunity to leapfrog global competition, not by outspending others, but by out-innovating them with AI-driven science. Sharing my thoughts in my article on AI for Science: India’s Chance to Lead the R&D Revolution - https://lnkd.in/gGa4WFtG #AIforScience #NITIFrontierTechHub NITI Aayog Times Techies
Great points Debjani Ghosh and thanks for shining a light on this. We need to get to a place where there are more names out of India when articles like this are written. The efforts from ANRF will surely provide impetus. Apart from that, it will also help to get communities of AI researchers and scientists from the natural sciences working together in a more purposeful way, shorting for bigger ambitions. One thing the two communities are doing is to bring an AI for Science focus in the research conversation by the new AI for Sceinces track this year at the premier AI conference of India CODS. The AI Alliance members in India are also planning a technical meetup with AI for Science as one of the focus areas. We in India need a big push in this space in 2026 just like we made a push on LLMs this year.
A well articulated and timely article Debjani Ghosh. Excited about the ANRF and its objectives and looking forward to how we can partner on this mission! SarthhakAI, our 1 yr old company is enabling scientific discovery -> experimentation -> new development -> scale up for both commercial and institutional R&D in chemical, life science and material domains. We have established an AI and robotics lab at INDIAN INSTITUTE OF PACKAGING - DELHI which enables a seamless integration of testing and development workflows data into our flagship bodh scientific platform for AI driven R&D. We are also working with R&D teams in commercial setting on innovations in formulation science and material product development. excited about how we could partner on this mission in coming months !! Satvik Kalra https://sarthhakai.com/
Good write up Debjani Ghosh . Boltzmann Labs is working on AI for science from past 6+ years. We need a think tank and policy discussing about AI4science and Autonomous science discoveries enabled by ecosystem support.
Excellent essay, Debjani! And so well said - “This could be India’s golden opportunity to leapfrog global competition, not by outspending others, but by out-innovating them with AI-driven science.” Fully agree with this direction which India 🇮🇳 should embed and double down on in all our future plans! 👍
Nice Article Mam with valid points for the future thought. As an acamedician, I have some observations like in present senario our approach towards the AI is plug and play approach. It is true that most of the conferences and think tanks in India or in New Delhi talking about AI-ML day or night. But is our skills in India is ready for the AI Challenges. And is reason is laking of AI Infra, Industry wants people but not injecting mony towards academic for formation of AI Skill Development environment. AI required deep research and practice with Good understanding of Statistics, Math and Python. Without it not possible to create good AI Models. Softly, which I have observed that we are using AI as trial and error method by getting models from Gethub.
Debjani Ghosh The real power of AI is not just in doing more science, but in changing the way science is structured and conducted. In India, where R&D investment remains low, AI can provide the scaffolding to systematically accelerate discovery from hypothesis generation to experimentation and validation without simply increasing budgets. The key is to embed AI into the core architecture of research: reproducible methods, open datasets, iterative feedback loops, and cross-disciplinary integration. By redesigning the process of science itself, India can convert under-investment into strategic advantage, producing insights faster and more efficiently than traditional approaches allow.
200% Agree. But we need enough investment in the compute to run these AI driven R & D, enough investment in human resource to run these AI driven investment.
Absolutely insightful piece, Debjani Ghosh While AI augmentation can indeed accelerate R&D cycles across biotech, pharma, materials science, ESG, and many other industries, true acceleration of innovation will come when India becomes a global hub for creativity and experimentation. We need to think disruptively — coupling AI-driven innovation with global capital flows and financial systems that attract both investment and top talent into India’s innovation ecosystem. If India can position itself as a magnet for researchers, entrepreneurs, and funds from across the world, the synergy between AI and global finance could make India one of the fastest-growing innovation centers globally. 🚀🇮🇳 #AI #Innovation #DeepTech #R&D #India #GlobalCapital
Debjani, we need such refreshing approaches indeed! Another aspect of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)'s approach is funding parallel initiatives simultaneously to solve the same problem. While some may call it unnecessary and redundant, it actually creates novel opportunities for #competition as well as #collaboration since it is difficult to know well in advance which particular approach would work! Emergence of TCP/IP under the aegis of DARPA and even the evolution of #PC at IBM are just two examples of this success! And, talking of #mRNA vaccines for #COVID19, I'd written in a Mint article published almost 14 months before the debut of #chatgpt, : "Ability of generating ‘synthetic data’ using ‘digital twins’ also opens immense opportunities for innovation. For example, best vaccine candidates have been and are being proactively identified by testing efficacy against potential mutations of the SARS-Cov-2 virus even before these emerge." https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/india-badly-needs-an-overarching-policy-framework-for-data-governance-11634492514982.html Happy to discuss more in detail.
Great points Debjani. ANRF (along with IndiaAI mission and multiple scientific departments) is aligned w your and NITI s clarion call via this MAHA mission mode program on AI for Science and Engineering. We aim to unlock at a national scale, open models and open data (an open India stack for AI for Science) We encourage the research ecosystem to take advantage of this mission mode program. We are also welcoming non government and industry partners to participate with us. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anrfindia_anrfindia-activity-7387079326254579713--FFa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAAA2jsABRAFqgd6Bj4hGyQD4K4gXH-dsDkE