Will A Nation Grow Stagnate Decline Technology Will Tell
Indian Express
There is a question every civilisation has had to answer in its own era: What is the engine of prosperity? For most of human history, the answers were familiar land, labour, capital, natural...
There is a question every civilisation has had to answer in its own era: What is the engine of prosperity? For most of human history, the answers were familiar — land, labour, capital, natural resources, trade routes. Nations that commanded these inputs commanded wealth and power. The Industrial Revolution added machinery and energy to that list. The 20th century added finance, institutions, and geopolitical leverage. But we are living through a rupture in that long pattern. For the first time, technology is not merely one factor among many that supports economic growth. It is the primary, foundational, and irreplaceable determinant of whether a nation grows, stagnates, or declines.
Consider what the last three decades have revealed. Countries that invested early and seriously in technology — the US, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel — have generated disproportionate shares of global wealth and wielded disproportionate geopolitical influence. Contrast this with resource-rich nations that failed to build technological capacity. They remain dependent — their wealth volatile, their growth episodic, their strategic position weak. Covid confirmed this in the starkest possible terms. Nations with strong digital infrastructure maintained economic activity. Nations with mRNA technology capability produced vaccines at unprecedented speed. Nations with advanced logistics and AI-enabled supply chains recovered faster.
Previous technological revolutions unfolded across decades or centuries. Nations could observe, adapt, and catch up. That window is narrowing rapidly. AI, in particular, is not a static capability that can be acquired off the shelf. It compounds. A nation that builds strong AI capability today will have exponentially stronger capability in five years. A nation that delays will face not a gap but a chasm.
Recent moves by the US government to prohibit access to certain AI models are a clear sign that technology denial is and will be a part of the geopolitical toolkit of certain nations. India has the demographic scale and intellectual capital. What it has historically underinvested in is the third ingredient: Technological sovereignty. The capacity to design, manufacture, and deploy critical technology on Indian soil, under Indian control, for
Indian strategic and economic purposes. The India Semiconductor Mission, the PLI and DLI schemes, the IndiaAI mission, the Digital India infrastructure, the STA framework for platform and AI regulation — these are steps in the right direction. But they are the first steps. The destination is an India that does not merely consume technology or export talent, but that is a full-spectrum technology power. That destination will only be reached if policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs internalise that technology is the substrate on which every other sector runs.
There is a final, democratic dimension to this argument that is often overlooked. Technology-driven economic growth is, at its best, the most broadly distributed form of prosperity in history. Digital platforms have given small businesses access to national markets. Mobile payments have given unbanked citizens access to the financial system. Telemedicine has given remote communities access to healthcare. Online education has given first-generation learners access to world-class knowledge. In a country like India, these gains represent the difference between exclusion and participation for hundreds of millions of people. The politics of technology in India cannot be the preserve of elites.
History will record the current era as the moment when technology ceased to be a means to an end and became the end itself. Nations that understood this early and acted with seriousness and urgency will write the story of the century.
Those that did not will find themselves reading it. India has every reason and every capability to be among those who write it. The question is only how urgently we choose to.
The writer is BJP Kerala state president, MLA for Nemom, former minister of state for Electronics & IT, and the architect of India’s IT Rules 2021 and the Safe-Trusted-Accountable (STA) framework for platform and AI governance. Views are personal