Artificial intelligence & India: The Modi model of technology diffusion

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent podcast conversation with Lex Fridman, made a pithy comment that no matter what the world does with artificial intelligence (AI), it will be incomplete without India. The comment was clearly directed at the race of sorts that has emerged between the United States and China for technological dominance this decade. As India charts its path to emerge as a developed scientific and technological power by 2047, a key determinant of success will be our ability to diffuse emerging technologies across the length and breadth of our society and harness their power to rapidly grow economic strength, expand state capacity and bolster institutional resilience. India’s historical trajectory in adopting new technologies has been anything but linear, smooth, and predictable. 

From mobile telephony to cashless payments, our technological journey has been dotted by quantum leaps, skipping many intermediate transitions typical of the developed West. Since 2014, when Modi took office as Prime Minister, these quantum leapfrogs have had two defining characteristics, which merit deeper examination in the context of how technology diffusion has happened in India. The first characteristic has to do with the creation of cloud-based public digital platforms that can be accessed over the public internet at a scale of a billion, aided largely by the absence of baggage associated with legacy technology systems. The second has to do with leadership by example that has spurred and motivated not only citizen adoption but, more importantly, an entire generation of technology entrepreneurs and a network of startups to develop applications and services around these public digital platforms.

  While much of the public discourse has been around this stack of Digital Public Goods and their population-scale impact, the role of leadership has been underappreciated. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the role of leadership in driving societal-scale technology diffusion in India during the Modi era comes from the Covid-19 pandemic period when even the most technologically advanced of societies witnessed both vaccine hesitancy and hiccups in rollout of vaccines to much smaller populations. A Modi-led India was able to demonstrate both state capacity to vaccinate at a scale of a billion in a timely manner within the constraints of a developing economy and societal readiness to adopt the vaccines, resulting in an opening up of the economy even as China was still stuck with zero-Covid mandates.

  Between the quantum leaps powered by digital public goods and population-scale vaccination during the pandemic, lie pointers to a model of technology diffusion that is unique to the Narendra Modi era. While leadership by example emerges as a common thread running through these examples, there is also the transformative power of collective participation, cultural connectivity, and holistic change that has been effective at nudging behavioural change without the need for authoritarian diktats of the kind China has witnessed. While the developed West has advanced an alphabet soup of models and frameworks over the decades such as ESG, DEI, and SDGs, targeting both organisational and societal change, their inherent limitations have become abundantly clear in recent times. From devolving into superficial compliance exercises or window-dressing to meet reporting requirements, there has been little to show by way of sustainable transformative change. Being overly focused on process rather than outcomes, these have also failed to meaningfully transform underlying cultures and systemic biases within societies and institutions. Technocratic top-down frameworks have also found to be lacking adequate mechanisms to truly engage communities at the grassroots level, thus limiting local ownership and sustained impact. Collectively, these constructs often emphasise measurable outcomes without adequately addressing the deeper shifts in leadership philosophy, institutional behaviour, and societal mindsets necessary for enduring change.

  In stark contrast, the Modi model of technology-led developmental change has several elements that can be synthesised into a formal institutional framework. From the creed of universal participation to the ethic of servant leadership, such a formal framework can go beyond the conventional playbook by integrating deep cultural values with a strong bias for tangible action over optics of intentions. From “mass mobilisation” around a shared vision that can energise communities to gamification that can turn passive users into active stakeholders and brand advocates, the Modi era efforts at technology diffusion holds several key lessons for such a formal framework. The Modi model of inclusion, rooted in the principle of collective efforts and shared value realisation, has at its heart a spiritual anchoring and a moral compass rooted in indigenous culture and native wisdom that celebrates localised grassroots successes as pathways to broader transformation.

  The more than two-hour podcast conversation between Modi and Fridman stands out for distilling all of these aspects and locating them within the context of human-centric developmental change in the age of artificial intelligence. With his personal use of AI for delivering his speeches in multiple Indian languages, Modi has shown the way for how India can realise societal-scale benefits from AI by overcoming language barriers. Extending the Modi model of technology diffusion to AI and other related emerging technologies requires stronger formalism and deeper institutionalisation if India has to accelerate its journey to becoming a great science and technology power over the next two decades.

  The author is former CEO of Prasar Bharati