India must ramp up R&D capabilities to disrupt strategic supply chains: Debjani Ghosh

New Delhi [India], April 11 (ANI): Debjani Ghosh, a fellow at the NITI Aayog and the former president of industry body Nasscom, on Friday said there are "important opportunities" facing India, and the country must ramp up its R&D capabilities.

Ghosh, speaking to ANI on the sidelines of the Carnegie Global Tech Summit, said India must build world-class R&D capabilities to disrupt some of the strategic supply chains--semiconductor and bioengineering, among others.

"These are going to be very impactful from a security perspective, compute perspective," she said.

As AI adoption rises, energy requirements will incrementally grow, and Ghosh believes India can become a market for the world to source renewable energy.

"AI needs energy, and that demand is only going to grow. The world needs clean energy. Can India become a source code for clean and affordable energy for the world?" she asked.

The former Nasscom President feels that India also has the requisite talent pool for AI technology.

"India is, and I think will continue to be, the talent nation of the world, and we have to continue to improve the quality of our talent to meet the needs. And last but not the least, I think it's very important as everyone is racing to build AI, we don't forget that AI should exist to help humans, to augment humans, and I think India is very well placed to champion the cause of human-centric AI," Ghosh said.

Earlier, speaking at a panel discussion at the Summit, Debjani Ghosh delved into the AI landscape in India and how the country can leverage the opportunities this emerging technology has to offer.

Ghosh said she thinks there is little understanding and agreement in terms of what is really happening in the AI space, where this is going to head.

"The thing that we do know is the pace of evolution is something we have never experienced before. The rules of competition are completely being re-written (with changing dynamics). I still believe we are in early days, and the competition on how this will play out and the rules are going to change pretty drastically over the next few years," Ghosh had said.

Debjani Ghosh is a distinguished fellow at the NITI Aayog and the chief architect of the NITI Frontier Tech Hub. With a career spanning over 28 years, she has held pivotal leadership roles--she was the first woman to lead Intel's South Asia operations and the first female president of Nasscom (April 2018 to November 2024).