India’s technical rise must be built on frugal innovation

As the global commentary poured in following the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, a familiar anxiety resurfaced: scholars and practitioners argued that middle powers such as India lack the capital investment bandwidth and institutional infrastructure to build their own indigenous AI full stacks, and implied that they should instead focus on building unique use-cases at scale atop AI architectures built elsewhere. This argument, while not without merit, mistakes a constraint for a ceiling. India has demonstrated in consequential domains that resource scarcity does not preclude technological ambition; rather, it sharpens it. The imperative now is to institutionalise this instinct.

The key question being posed before India is this: How does a capital-constrained civilisation compete in a century defined by compute, chips, and AI infrastructure? The defining technological challenge for India is not whether it can outspend the United States or outscale China. It is whether a civilisation with limited resources can pioneer a different model of technological advancement altogether. India’s AI story cannot be a mimicry of capital-heavy innovation models built in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen; rather, it should focus on building a sovereign, scalable, and frugal technological civilisation. At the core of India’s unique trajectory in scientific advancement lie its capabilities in frugal innovation.

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Frugal Innovation as India’s Superpower

A millennium of colonisation had left India without economic resources and bereft of a scientific establishment. It is to the credit of early institution-builders such as CV Raman, Vikram Sarabhai, Meghnad Saha and PC Mahalanobis that India was able to create a scientific culture and innovate across domains against all odds. India’s institution-builders in science and technology were not merely administrators or engineers. They were civilisational architects who built enduring capability under conditions of extreme scarcity. This historical backdrop is central to today’s discussions revolving around R&D and technological innovation. India’s tradition of doing more with fewer resources is not mere improvisation; it is a distinct innovation methodology with a philosophical lineage that deserves serious intellectual treatment alongside Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things”, or China’s state-directed scale plays. Frugal innovation as a distinct philosophy must not be conflated with the art of building cheap substitutes. It should be understood as the discipline of maximising societal impact per unit of capital, infrastructure, and energy.

The concept of jugaad, loosely translated as workaround, but culturally understood as constraint-driven ingenuity, is an anecdotal invocation emphasising Indians’ entrepreneurial, solution-oriented approach. India’s jugaad democracy has systematically produced world-class outcomes in scientific domains. Indian innovation culture has historically evolved around constraint-driven systems thinking, proving its ability to engineer scalable solutions for the Indian population despite severe limitations of income, infrastructure, and institutional access. To cite an instance, ISRO’s Mangalyaan Mars mission cost less than the production budget of the Hollywood film Gravity. The Jaipur Foot, a cost-effective prosthetic limb developed for amputees as far back as 1969, was another instance of frugal innovation directed at empowering the populace of developing countries with limited access to costly medical infrastructure. For that matter, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), built on open-source digital architecture, has turned into a medium for transaction volumes rivalling global payment giants.

Indian history of science and technology in the 20th century has witnessed multiple case studies of frugal innovation. However, a sharp line of distinction must be drawn between frugal innovation and underfunded innovation. Celebration of frugality cannot be an apologia for the underfunding of scientific institutions, nor should frugal innovation become an ideological justification for chronic underinvestment in science and research. Just as adequate funding does not translate into an open call for the splurging of resources, similarly frugality does not automatically create leeway for innovators to be trapped in a scarcity mindset. Rather, frugality in innovation demands a design orientation that asks, from the outset, how to engineer for the constrained majority rather than the affluent minority. It is this genius of scientific minds to build core and frontier technologies unconventionally that needs to be retained as the mark of India’s competitive identity. India’s challenge is not to glorify scarcity, but to combine capital efficiency with scientific excellence.

The 21st Century Opportunity and the China Challenge

Kishore Mahbubani, the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, in his seminal work The Asian 21st Century, has argued that the 21st century is witnessing the return of Asian economies to the world stage, and that the emergence of China as a hegemonic force is pivotal to the shift in the balance of power towards Asia. Despite varying projections on the future of the AI race, China has certainly established itself as a frontier-setter. The DeepSeek moment in early 2025 was a timely reminder of China’s capabilities in building frontier technology at a fraction of the compute cost of its American peers. China has built a formidable innovation ecosystem where technological ambition is treated as a matter of civilisational pride, and the state firmly prioritises technological sovereignty.

The Chinese state apparatus has given a cultural logic to this prioritisation: it sees scientific laggardness as the cause of the “century of humiliation”, and absolute technological domination as the pathway to catapult China back to the centre of the world. Tanner Greer, a China hawk, documents the country’s excellence across all fronts — whether academia, technological innovation, or raw research. A recent report highlights the influx of Chinese AI engineers into Silicon Valley, being poached en masse by American Big Tech giants, and implies the remote possibility of Silicon Valley being dominated by Chinese technological hegemons in the future — a Shenzhen within Silicon Valley, dictating its direction.

The Indian Century: A Narrow Window

India might not have the institutional architecture to match China, but it does possess certain structural advantages — a democratic political system that makes its technology exports trustworthy, an English-language talent base that integrates easily into global collaborative networks, and a growing diaspora well placed in leadership positions across several consequential technology institutions. The Indian AI ecosystem is already harnessing its potential in efficiency-first development, building leaner models for Indian language diversity, lower-bandwidth deployment, and edge computing at scale. In an increasingly fragmented technological order, trust in India’s democratic structure and open digital public infrastructure makes it a more acceptable technology partner for large parts of the world seeking alternatives to both American platform monopolies and Chinese state-centric systems.

Building an innovation culture within India’s academic institutions cannot be deferred due to the lack of a well-funded ecosystem. The causality runs the other way; a vibrant innovation culture attracts funding ecosystems. Industry partnerships, government collaboration, and venture interest follow demonstrated capability and intellectual momentum. A culture of rigorous problem-solving under constraints is the first step towards actively nurturing an innovation ecosystem with disproportionate global impact. India’s technology pioneers have embraced frugality as an innovation philosophy in the past. The mantle now rests upon today’s technologists to cultivate an innovation culture by building human archetypes who can inspire the next generation of builders. Technological civilisations are ultimately built inside institutions before they are expressed through markets. Universities, research laboratories, startup ecosystems, and public digital infrastructure must operate as interconnected systems with smooth institutional coordination.

The need to harness frugal innovation for India’s technological prowess is not just about leadership; it is also about positioning India as a pioneer to be modelled upon by the rest of the Global South. Much of the Global South cannot adopt Western models of high-cost technological deployment. India’s opportunity lies in building interoperable, low-cost technological systems that can scale across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America under real-world infrastructure constraints.

India has leapfrogged technological transitions to compete on an equal footing with global technological advances in the past. The AI Impact Summit’s narrative drew a dichotomy between building use-cases and infrastructure, pushing to the margins India’s fundamental quest for ambition and technological leadership. Economic and geopolitical leadership will follow technological leadership, but India’s positioning as a pioneer of frugal innovation in AI will be the prime catalyst in achieving that end.

Conclusion

At its deepest level, the debate at the India AI Impact Summit was a question of what kind of technological actor India wants to be. A sophisticated consumer of AI architectures built elsewhere, deploying them tactically for scalable use-cases? Or a builder of models, of infrastructure, of a methodology that the world learns from?

The civilisations that shape technological paradigms shape the century itself. India’s challenge is not merely to participate in the artificial intelligence revolution, but to demonstrate that innovation rooted in accessibility, openness, and civilisational confidence can compete with models built primarily on capital concentration and centralised control.

India has the talent. It has historical evidence of what constrained ingenuity can produce. Now, it needs the institutional will to treat frugal innovation not as a stopgap in the absence of capital, but as a first-principles design philosophy worthy of a civilisation that seeks to influence the trajectory of the 21st century.

The 21st century is being written. India should insist on holding the pen.

(Prof. Shobhit Mathur is the Vice Chancellor and Co-Founder of Rishihood University. Yashowardhan Tiwari is a Programme Manager – Office of the Vice Chancellor, at Rishihood University. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.)