Deeptech as India's $1T opportunity: What will it take?

India stands at the cusp of a tectonic shift in its economic and technological landscape. Deeptech, the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, space technology, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing, can drive India's next $1 trillion growth engine.

Yet this chance will not linger. The global competition is rapidly heating up, and unless there is quick, concerted action, India can become a ‘product-in-adversarial-world’ service provider.

From agile innovation to deep, foundational R&D

India's culture of innovation has always prized agility, cleverness, and resourcefulness, which characterised the building of a successful startup ecosystem. However, to dominate in deeptech, we need to transform now into a paradigm that supports sustained, intense R&D—one that bets on basic science, encourages long-term risk, and constructs for generations of impact.

In contrast to mainstream software industries, deeptech requires a high-patience, high-risk approach. The ecosystem needs to cease viewing science-driven innovation as an ancillary. Without embracing real research depth, with year-long, not quarter-long timeframes, we will lag behind global centres of innovation in bringing transformative technologies.

India's advantage is convergence. AI is not alone; it now drives precision robotics, high-end health diagnostics, automated satellite systems, and autonomous vehicles. This convergence is speeding up. As industries converge and technologies conflate, India stands an opportunity to skip industrial phases and design new world standards.

But short of domestic dominance of the hardware and infrastructure stack, notably semiconductors, Indian dreams will still be held back.

Chips are to deeptech what steel was to the Industrial Revolution. India's semiconductor initiative is admirable, but the delay in action jeopardises long-term digital dependence. Other countries are taking chip sovereignty aggressively. We need to act or risk becoming irrelevant.

GenAI: India’s hidden execution dividend

The GenAI wave presents a strategic opening, but only if we define our role wisely. India is uniquely positioned to be the world’s GenAI execution engine, thanks to three core advantages—a massive developer base familiar with open-source AI tools; rich, multilingual datasets essential for training inclusive models; and a public digital infrastructure (DPI) stack like Aadhaar and UPI that can be AI-augmented at population scale.

But the danger is real: If India limits GenAI to chatbot front-ends or translation apps, we will forfeit our lead. The focus must shift to verticalised, embedded GenAI use cases in agriculture, health, education, and public governance. That’s where value and defensibility lie.

The next decade won’t be won by who builds the biggest model, but by who applies it most meaningfully. India has the scale and context to build applied AI systems that solve ground-level problems.

Talent, capital, and urgency: The 3 gaps to close

To seize this deeptech moment, India must close three critical gaps.

First, on talent. Although we make world-class engineers in volume, we are under-equipped in foundational research. For example, India contributes less than 1% of the world's AI patents. We require structural incentives for PhDs, post-doc research, and deeptech entrepreneurship out of labs and not campuses.

Second, in capital. Deeptech startups need 7–10 year horizons, yet the majority of India's capital continues to pursue quick paybacks. Without a financing ecosystem that will accept scientific risk, blended finance, R&D grants backed by governments, and strategic investments by corporations, we will continue to export talent and import solutions.

Third, in policy. India's DPI achievement demonstrates what can happen when the state creates for scale. However, for deeptech, policy has to transition from vision papers to action. What we require are interoperable standards in AI, open data ecosystems, and sectoral sandboxes. If regulation is bogging us down, we will lose the opportunity to set global norms.

The cost of hesitation

If we let this opportunity slip, the options will be stark: we stand to become consumers, rather than creators, of next-gen AI systems. Our youth dividend may turn into a liability—irrelevant in the global jobs—and we will still be at the mercy of foreign tech infrastructure, much as we have been with our past energy dependence.

This is not alarmism; it's realism because the window is narrow, and other countries are advancing at a faster pace, are deeper-pocketed, and more focused. If we procrastinate, the deeptech value chain will coalesce behind some other nation, and we will be reduced to playing on the margins, not the breakthroughs.

This is India's moment for deeptech, not simply to play catch-up, but to lead the way to a more inclusive, innovation-driven world. With our demographic dividend, digital infrastructure, and growing scientific ambition, we are best placed. What we require today is conviction, urgency, and the boldness to build.

The world is waiting. The question is: Are we ready?

(Madan Padaki is the President of TiE Bangalore.)