Modi scripts India's technology renaissance with 2025 as the anchor year

The year India crossed the Rubicon: How 2025 anchored a technology renaissance. This will be a story to tell in the decades to come. History rarely announces turning points in real time. Yet, as 2025 draws to a close, it is increasingly clear that this was not just another year in India’s development story; it was the year India crossed the Rubicon. What unfolded over the past 12 months was not merely incremental progress, but a decisive shift in the national trajectory on science, technology, and innovation. If the previous decade saw the building of India’s digital highways, 2025 was the year traffic on them, perhaps, became supersonic. 

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, India’s technology journey has moved from adoption to assertion.

The country is no longer content to merely integrate and adopt global innovations. With a billion-people democracy, a growing economy, and one of the highest penetrations of mobile devices, India is actively shaping global innovations, both as a talent hub and a consumer market. The cumulative effect of policy, investment, and institutional reform has produced something rarer than growth. From this confluence has emerged a coherent technological worldview on how India aims to carve its space at the global high table alongside the United States and China. 

While the year has seen several initiatives take root, shape, and bloom, the operationalisation of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) would stand out for its focus on catalysing science research alongside the Research and Development Innovation Fund (RDIF) to move ideas from the lab to the market. With a commitment of ~1 trillion, the RDIF, riding on the foundation of ANRF, promises to do what India has long struggled to in developing patient capital that would back high-risk, high-reward research, and innovations at scale. With the goal of dismantling the historic divide between academia, industry, and national missions, enabling science to serve both discovery and deployment, the twin engines of ANRF and RDIF are at the heart of Modi’s technology renaissance. 

India’s aspirations to claim global leadership are best exemplified by the IndiaAI Mission with Modi set to host a spectrum of global leaders and technology titans in New Delhi for the AI Impact Summit in February 2026. In a world dominated by a handful of global AI platforms, India chose not regulation alone, but creation. The incubation of BharatGen, a sovereign multimodal AI model trained across India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, signalled a philosophical shift. This was not AI as a black box imported from elsewhere; it was about building AI as public infrastructure that is transparent, accountable, and rooted in Indian realities. It marked a transition from digital consumer to digital creator. 

The same assertion of autonomy runs through India’s semiconductor and advanced manufacturing push. With mobile phone exports seeing remarkable growth, India now has its sights set on developing indigenous chips, and potentially building its own sovereign infrastructure for AI. From Nvidia to Google Deepmind, the contributions of India’s talent pool are proof that upstream opportunities in the global technology value chain are well within the country’s grasp with the right institutional and funding frameworks. This, coupled with the strategic push on rare earths and critical minerals, has shown a roadmap for how India can insulate itself from the vulnerabilities of depoliticised supply chains. 

Energy, too, has been reimagined through a technological lens. The passage of the SHANTI Bill promises the sustainable harnessing and advancement of nuclear technology for India. It is perhaps one of the most consequential legislative Acts of the decade. By unlocking private participation in nuclear energy, especially small modular reactors, India has aligned its climate ambitions with its compute-intensive future to enable data centres, fabs, and gigafactories that will define the next growth cycle.

If infrastructure provides the skeleton of this renaissance, aspiration is its soul. Few moments captured this better than India’s human spaceflight milestone. When Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla carried the tricolour into orbit, it was more than a scientific achievement; it was a generational signal. With the approval of the Bharatiya Antariksha Station and the successful demonstration of LVM3 heavy-lift capabilities, space has become a canvas for national imagination. The message to India’s youth was unmistakable. The future is not something to chase abroad. The future is being built at home with missions such as Gaganyaan charting new frontiers. 

This confidence is spilling into adjacent domains. Direct-to-mobile (D2M) technology, pioneered by Indian institutions and commercialised by domestic firms, promises to transform information access, providing resilient alternatives to data-heavy cellular networks. It is a reminder that frugal, frontier innovation can coexist and often outperform legacy models designed for very different societies. 

Yet the true measure of technological maturity lies in its performance under pressure. That test came during Operation Sindoor. Faced with asymmetric threats, India demonstrated a level of technological integration once reserved for major powers: AI-enabled surveillance, indigenous swarm drones, secure communications, and electronic warfare systems operating in seamless concert. What stood out was not just capability, but confidence that comes from owning the stack. The operation underscored a crucial truth on why it is important for India to pursue indigenous dual-use technologies in order to deal with the

geopolitical and strategic realities of this decade. 

From the National Critical Minerals Mission to the National Quantum Mission, from sovereign AI clouds to the semiconductors mission, from homegrown space systems to a future nuclear-powered energy grid, India’s technology renaissance being scripted under Narendra Modi’s leadership is no longer about isolated verticals but about interlocking pieces of a coherent national strategy. 

As 2025 closes, one conclusion stands out. In Modi’s India, technology is no longer a sector; it has to come to be the nation’s strategy. When combined with the spate of economic and administrative reforms being rolled out in tandem, it lays the foundation for a multi-decade transformation in line with the vision for a Viksit Bharat by 2047. 

 

The author is former CEO, Prasar Bharati