India is on track to become a global leader in artificial intelligence by 2035, powered by its young talent pool, abundant data resources, and a rapidly expanding semiconductor ecosystem, experts said on Monday at the India International Science Festival (IISF) 2025.
The four-day event, which began on December 6, has emerged as one of the year’s most influential science and innovation platforms, inspiring students, researchers, and start-ups while contributing to the nation’s vision of Viksit Bharat@2047, according to officials.
Speaking at the festival, IIT Ropar Director Prof. Rajeev Ahuja said India’s strengths place it firmly on the path to becoming a global AI powerhouse. “India is preparing to become a global AI leader by 2035, powered by young talent and the country’s data-rich ecosystem,” he said.
Ahuja highlighted the IndiaAI Mission’s goals — training one crore youth in artificial intelligence, building a robust national compute grid, developing homegrown AI models, and promoting responsible and ethical AI development aligned with India-centric needs.
The forum brought together leaders from academia, industry, and research to discuss the evolution from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and how this shift will redefine science, industry, and society. Speakers stressed the need for India-specific datasets, indigenous models, and advanced language technologies to ensure inclusive development and digital equity.
Pratyush Kumar, Co-Founder of Sarvam AI, demonstrated multilingual AI systems under the IndiaAI Mission, including India’s first sovereign foundational Large Language Model (LLM) designed specifically for Indian languages.
Gopal Krishna Bhatt, Director of Data Centre Customer Engineering at Intel, outlined India’s accelerating progress in server architecture, chip engineering, and high-performance computing (HPC). He said dozens of server and data-centre hardware designs are currently being developed in India, driven by the government’s push for semiconductor self-reliance and cutting-edge digital infrastructure.
NVIDIA’s Manish Modani added that India’s growing HPC and GPU-based infrastructure is significantly boosting scientific research, from climate modelling and genomics to defence technologies and language computing. He said the combination of data scale, linguistic diversity, and scientific talent uniquely positions India to lead the global transition from AI to AGI.
With major stakeholders aligned and national missions gaining momentum, India is aiming not just to adopt global AI trends, but to shape them — positioning itself at the forefront of the next wave of technological transformation.
