Rajat Khare highlights India’s need to build and retain its own AI expertise as the nation develops an indigenous large language model. India is poised to become a major global AI player, backed by a vast pool of engineers, data scientists, and IT professionals. Yet nearly 15% of the world’s AI workforce—many of them Indians—works abroad, limiting India’s technological progress.
Khare views this brain drain as a fixable challenge. He urges stronger industry–academia collaboration, higher research funding, and innovation-friendly policies to create an ecosystem where top talent can thrive at home. The rapid expansion of India’s digital infrastructure and its GPU-backed domestic LLM project mark critical steps toward AI self-reliance.
India’s unique advantage lies in multilingual AI. With 22 official languages and numerous dialects, India can build culturally aware models capable of serving diverse linguistic communities, empowering rural populations, improving public services, and expanding AI access beyond English speakers.
To retain talent and become a global innovation hub, India must boost AI research funding, create fellowships and incentives, support deep-tech startups, expand centers of excellence, and engage Indian researchers abroad. Khare stresses that India’s leadership in global AI depends not only on technology but on nurturing and keeping its people.
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