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China’s recent launch of DeepSeek, an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) model, has once again demonstrated the country’s growing prowess in AI research and development. This raises an important question: Why has India, despite its strong technological base and significant investments in AI, not been able to launch a comparable model? Given that the Chinese claim to have built DeepSeek with just $7 million—an amount that is well within India’s AI budget—the issue is not one of funding. Instead, the answer lies in deeper structural, strategic, and policy-related challenges. This article explores these challenges and proposes a roadmap for India to strengthen its AI ecosystem.Challenges Hindering India’s AI Development
Challenges Hindering India’s AI DevelopmentFragmented AI Research and Lack of Centralized Strategy: India’s AI research efforts are spread across various government agencies, private enterprises, and academic institutions, but there is no unified strategy to ensure their seamless collaboration. Unlike China, where AI development is heavily centralized and directed by state policy, India’s efforts are often fragmented, leading to inefficiencies.Talent Drain and Skill Gaps: India produces some of the world’s best AI researchers, but many of them migrate to global tech hubs like Silicon Valley due to better research opportunities, funding, and work environments. While India has a vast pool of software engineers, expertise in deep learning, computational linguistics, and AI-specific hardware engineering remains limited.
