Alliances are key to Delhi’s deep tech ambitions

(The article was originally published in Indian Express as a part of Dr Ram Madhav’s column titled Ram Rajya on May 23, 2026. Views expressed are personal.) 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Nordic countries was marred by the unruly behaviour of a local journalist, Helle Lyng Svendsen. Her screams at the joint media appearance of prime ministers Narendra Modi of India and Jonas Gahr Store of Norway showcased the unbecoming behaviour of a member of the Norwegian press. Svensen’s claims that it was a standard “confrontational journalism”, and the duty of a journalist representing the “freest press in the world” are laughable.

Norway is a country with five million population – smaller than the population of Indian cities like Pune and Hyderabad. Newspapers in these cities are as free as Dagsavisen, a local newspaper that Svendsen represented. Moreover, Dagsavisen is a paper owned by a company called Mentor Medier AS, whose major shareholders are Norwegian Christian missionary organisations including several Lutheran organisations. The paper she represented is one of the smallest newspapers in Norway, selling 15,000 copies a day, disproportionate to the ego of the journalist.

Norway has less than 300 news outlets as against India’s more than 1.55 lakh registered news organisations. 17,000 newspapers are published daily in 22 Indian languages. There are more than 900 satellite TV channels operating in India out of which around 400 are dedicated to news and current affairs. The digital media landscape in India boasts of more than 3700 digital news publications. This entire ecosystem enjoys enormous freedom, with several media organisations dedicated to criticising government alone. Before criticising India, pygmies of the biased Western media should understand the vastness and variety of the Indian media landscape.

Behaviour of Svendsen and her questioning style, like asking Indian prime minister whether “he deserves the trust of our government”, smack of the mindset of a racial supremacist journalist of the Western liberal media. Just as Mahatma Gandhi dismissed an American journalist Katherin Mayo’s highly selective negative portrayal of India in her Mother India essay in 1927 as “the report of a drain inspector”, Svendsen’s outbursts about lack of media freedom and human rights in India too should be dismissed as “gutter journalism”.

But beyond this headline-grabbing incident lies the importance of prime minister Modi’s mission during the visit to the Nordic Bloc and Italy and the Netherlands. In an article co-authored with his Italian counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, Modi highlighted the objective of his engagements with various world powers. “Our cooperation mirrors our shared awareness”, he wrote, “that prosperity and security in the 21^st century will be shaped by the ability of nations to innovate, manage energy transitions, and strengthen sovereignty”.

Our world is transitioning fast into a deep-tech order in which frontier technologies like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum, biotechnology, space, robotics, and crypto are going to play a critical role in defining the power pecking order of the nations. The future GDP will be a direct outcome of a nation’s GTP – gross technological prowess. Advent of these frontier technologies, especially the AI, and mastering of it by a few companies located in a couple of countries like the US and China, is leading to a situation where a new “tech-colonisation” by these countries will pose serious threats to the sovereignty of many countries.

Tech slavery is no longer a romantic idea. Arthur Mensch, CEO of a leading French AI company, Mistral AI, warned in a testimony before the French national assembly recently that Europe has just two years to build an independent AI stack failing which it will perpetually be at the mercy of the monopoly players of America. “Once supply is monopolised by American players, suddenly we no longer have supply, and we can no longer transform electrons into tokens” and Europe will become a “vassal state”, he bluntly told the policy makers. It is this urgency, and the serious concern about digital sovereignty, that is propelling Indian prime minister to proactively engage with European and other Asian powers.

In the last decade under Modi, India registered commendable progress in building efficient digital public infrastructure. Many countries in the world are today the beneficiaries of that DPI. But the new frontiers of deep-tech like AI, semiconductors, quantum etc need much more focus on innovation, R&D and investment. India has a vast pool of tech manpower and has been able to upgrade its basic digital infrastructure to world class. But where it is facing headwinds is in its ability to invest in developing entire stack of AI or semiconductor infrastructure. Modi government is singularly focusing on these areas and started several major initiatives like National AI Mission, National Quantum Mission and Anusandhan National R&D Mission etc. But what plagues India’s initiatives is that it is majorly government-funded with least interest among private investor community.

India’s total annual R&D investment is around 1.25 lakh crores or $15 billion. American semiconductor giant Nvidia spends $18.5 billion on annual R&D. India’s entire capital expenditure budget for year 2025-26 was R 10.97 lakh crore, which is roughly $132 billion. Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai announced recently that his company has plans to spend $190 billion capital expenditure in 2026 on AI infrastructure alone. These are the kind of volumes involved in deep-tech investments.

Modi’s effort through his engagements with European powers, including the recently concluded EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA), was towards “pooling our complementary strengths”. Nordic countries have huge investment potential running into trillions of dollars. India has engineering talent, scale, and innovation and start up ecosystem. What Modi is attempting to achieve is “a co-creation of value where our respective industrial strengths amplify one another”. He pitched for greater investments from the Nordic countries into India’s deep tech sector like green energy, AI etc.

India needs such alliances and engagements in its ambition to rise as a major deep-tech power and also safeguard its digital sovereignty. Modi is working with that futuristic vision, something, unlike others, a mature leader in the Opposition, Sharad Pawar understood when he said, “political differences should not come in the way when it comes to protecting India’s prestige, and PM Modi is working to uphold the country’s honour abroad”.