India must evolve from services to product nation: Ashwini Vaishnaw

India must transition beyond being only a services nation to a product nation in both software and hardware, developing solutions across the entire stack, union electronics and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Thursday.

“The old mindset where only certain government institutions would be developing everything has to now give way to a new mindset where a much broader partnership of academia, startups, students, researchers — they all must join together to create new solutions,” he said.

He was speaking at an awards ceremony for the winners of the ministry’s ‘Chips 2 Startups’ and Indian web browser development challenges in the national capital.

India must address the whole spectrum of chip design and development, both from the value and the volume perspective, said Vaishnaw. For instance, the chip controller used in Brushless DC (BLDC) motor which are an important component of electrical vehicles, is a large-volume, mid-value chip controller, he explained.

RISC-V is the real open-source chip architecture which can be used to design a CPU or a GPU and will turn out as a sustainable product out of this country, Vaishnaw said.

When it comes to AI, the cost of India not building its own large language model (LLM) may turn out to be more than the cost of building one, said Abhishek Singh, CEO of the IndiaAI Mission.

Building sovereign AI is the long-term goal of the mission and LLMs are a strategic technology that India, given its size and talent, needs to build, he said, speaking at the Nasscom Global Confluence in the national capital.A truly Indian AI model would have to be voice-based or enabled with voice even through feature phones to ensure real access and inclusion, Singh said.

“We do have 900 million people who are connected, but for the remaining 500 million people to come into the digital economy and become part of this ecosystem, they may need the Indian languages, they may need voice as the interface,” he said.

India needs to work further on research and development, collaborating with the rest of the world, minister of state for electronics and IT Jitin Prasada said at the Nasscom event.

“I urge all industry leaders here to ensure that research is a primary focus, as that is the way forward,” Prasada said.

Singh called upon the private sector to invest in Indian AI models, saying there’s no reason the country’s large IT companies should not be investing in this space.

“We always hear of a Microsoft research, Google research, or Intel research. We should have a TCS research, Infosys research, who can flow in some of the money that they make into this kind of business to build cutting edge models,” he said, and asked: “If startups are taking risks, why not our established IT companies?”