Why India Struggles with Innovation: The Real Problem Isn't Talent
Questioner: I'm Sagar. I'm from Bangalore. So I've been part of the Gita community for the past two years.
So my question is: recently this India AI Impact Summit happened in Delhi, which drew a couple of controversies. So the first thing is that on the opening days there was reportedly serious logistical mismanagement, long queues, confusion, and restricted access. Apparently, UPI was not working in an AI summit. And all this led to national embarrassment.
And there was one more incident that happened at the same event, where a university stall was asked to vacate after they showcased their Chinese-made robot as an indigenous innovation. And their claims were such that it took like 350 crores into research to do a two–three lakh toy. So once this happened, it led to a lot of public embarrassment as well. So all these incidents raise a deeper concern: whether our focus is shifting from building genuine scientific depth or just deep internal cultural insecurity.
So my question is: when a nation becomes invested in just showcasing innovation and managing PR rather than nurturing real research, where are we heading as a nation in terms of innovation?
Acharya Prashant: The nation is not in itself a conscious entity, beating, breathing, pulsating. No. You are the nation. So if you say the nation is more interested in show-off and PR rather than genuine research, the finger is actually pointing inwards.
What do you mean by nation? The trees, the roads, the hills, the rivers? The people are the nation, right?
Questioner: The collective mindset.
Acharya Prashant: Yeah, the people. Just as every single individual is interested in showing off rather than having anything of substance, that’s what gets manifested at summits or other occasions as well. That’s the character of the average individual. This is what I have.
Just a couple of hours back I was with a member of the foundation. He recently bought a car, a pre-owned one. It’s a brand and a model with a lineage. That model exists since some 70–80 years at least. So I told him, you have not seen the previous versions of this car. They were far better, sturdy, robust, and actually better looking as well. But they were not selling. It’s a foreign company, so they Indianized the model. They Indianized it. Now it is flashy from the outside and cheap from the inside, and it sells. Actually, even the dimensions of the car have been reduced. The dimension has been reduced. The weight has been reduced. The safety standards have probably been compromised, but now it sells.
And since I’ve had experience with the original model, which was some 25 years back, a little more than 25 years back, so I know how that one was and how the current one is. One would expect that with a quarter of a century of advancement, the product would actually get better. Instead of getting better, the product has been deliberately compromised, and now it sells.
It’s glitzy on the outside. The lights look good. We love toys. Twinkle, twinkle little star. Lots of lights on all sides and flashy colors to impress the neighbors. And that’s what the organization in question also wanted to do, to impress the neighbor. But the neighbor called it out. They said, “This dog belongs to us.”
Look at the average person around you. What else are we trying to do? “My Bunty should get admitted into a college, engineering college, something, because that’s what the cousins have managed.” How does it matter what Bunty is carrying within? Does the inner substance count for anything? All we care for is the form, and forms come cheap. We seem to have chosen cheapness.
Think of how much a fighter plane might cost, 2,000 CR, 5,000 CR, depending on how loaded it is. And what would an empty model of the same plane cost? Nothing. If it’s just to please, entertain, and impress, you can probably raise an almost real-looking model for 1% of the cost. That’s what we have opted for; won’t fly, won’t bomb, but would impress.
The wedding industry in India is bigger than the education industry. What are you trying to do? Impress. Go to small towns. No libraries, but dozens of banquet halls. What are you trying to do? Impress. Fake PhDs so that you can have a “doctor” against your name. Impress.
Most of what we do is more about visibility than authenticity. We want to be visible. We don’t want to be authentic. Don’t blame the nation. It’s about us, the citizens.
Think of a movie set. Does it not impress you? You know what it’s made of? Our lives are like movie sets built to impress.
We know India’s per capita income. We know when it comes to meaningful products, India is not a big market at all. But when it comes to reels and things, Instagram, India is a huge market, probably the biggest one. In fact, a lot of international companies do not enter India because they do not manage to find a way to dilute their offerings or products. And when they come up with something of a standard, something solid and genuine, it doesn’t sell. Because we don’t want that. We want something blingy, glossy, even if it’s hollow from within. But give me the bling.
First of all, what we need is a culture that promotes inward honesty. A culture in which people are always looking at each other to seek validation and authenticity would never produce genuine individuals. We need a culture that does not penalize deviants. When the whole thing is about inward hollowness, it becomes important to deviate, does it not? So we need deviants. We need rebels. We need whistleblowers.
Questioner: And sir, this impressing thing, it’s not as if others don’t know that we are impressing. Even the person in front of us knows that we are impressing, and that person also knows that we are trying to fool. It’s like we are fooling collectively, each other.
Acharya Prashant: In fact, it’s a friendship, a relationship of mutual deception. You are hollow. I am hollow. And we make our mutual hollownesses ring. Our hollownesses resonate with each other, and that’s the basis of our friendship. But if you are honest, then you’re scary, because you’ll call me out. So I’ll stay away.
Questioner: So we are actually not tired of a sweet life.
Acharya Prashant: One product that will never have a market here is the mirror. And one product that will have a huge market is colors. Colors.
Colors to fake to others. But mirrors are dangerous. Mirrors make you see what you want to avoid. Mirrors expose who you really are.
Questioner: Acharya Ji, just now, in the session, I was listening to your answer on the recent incident that happened at Bharat Mandapam, and you explained how it’s not just an isolated incident but actually a part of a deeper cultural pattern. So I just got curious and looked over some data, and it turns out that indeed it is not an isolated incident. There have been things like this that have been going on across various domains.
Acharya Prashant: Yeah. Continuously.
Questioner: In fact, so much that I took a printout of where exactly such things had happened earlier. So I have that in front of me. It mentions Bollywood, where the film industry has had a long and illustrious history of plagiarism. In fact, there’s an entire website that chronicles such things.
Acharya Prashant: Pick up stuff from abroad, presenting it as one’s own, and profit from it. The most obvious, the most visible, and audible example is definitely Bollywood.
It’s a cultural pattern. That’s why I was saying that it’s not a one-off thing. It’s not about one particular event, or one particular institution, or one particular product. It’s an all-pervasive thing. It’s become a part of our mental fabric to not be original, to not be creative, and somehow we don’t seem to find it undignified to pick up stuff from anywhere and label it as our own.
But as you say, you must also be cautious that that’s not what really defines India as a nation, right? It’s not as if there is some fundamental problem with the consciousness of our people. We have been stunningly original in the past, in several fields, several instances, institutions. We know of Brahmagupta, we know of zero. It is not an ordinary feat of thought to think of zero as having value of its own, and a value that varies according to its place in a particular number. That was a stunning innovation, great originality, remaining on maths. How does one ignore Bhaskara, Bhaskara II, Bhaskaracharya?
Questioner: That era.
Acharya Prashant: That entire era, and so many other mathematicians. The whole algebraic method of solving problems; not just solving one problem, but an entire system to approach any problem of the algebraic kind, solving quadratic equations. So all that was coming from this land and these people. And one has to then wonder: what is it that has now taken over us? That’s the question we must be paying attention to, because it’s not as if there is some genetic deformity here or something permanently wrong. Somewhere we have taken a wrong turn, or many wrong turns, maybe.
Questioner: Even nowadays, for example, if you look at Chandrayaan.
Acharya Prashant: It's not about antiquity. I mean, the Mars mission, that was not the first of its kind in the entire world, but the low cost at which it was achieved was very peculiar and very impressive.
Similarly, the soft landing of Chandrayaan on the south pole of the moon, that is a very remarkable feat. So it’s not as if we are not capable of originality. It’s just that the current culture, the pop culture, a lok-sanskriti, lokdharma, as I call it. They do not seem to promote anything original. And that’s why a renewal, a renaissance, is needed in India. We have the right philosophy. We have the right foundations of thought. What we need today is a challenge to the popular patterns of culture.
Questioner: The issue that it has become popular, not frowned upon. They give some examples from Bollywood. There is widespread copying.
Acharya Prashant: Bollywood is the most stunning and probably also the most shameful example. Most of the popular songs are actually coming from Hollywood or elsewhere, without any acknowledgement, any credits. And that was rife in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, because it was more difficult then to map, tally, and expose. Now, unfortunately, the trend hasn’t altogether ceased even today. Even today we have copies being circulated and then being labeled as “inspired by.” Not copied, just inspired. This is bad. Very bad.
Film scripts as well, songs, movie scripts, costumes, just about everything.
Questioner: There’s a compilation of almost 100 Bollywood movies that mark resemblance to Hollywood, South Korean, and Hong Kong films.
Acharya Prashant: Where is that compilation?
Questioner: It is there on the internet.
Acharya Prashant: By what name?
Questioner: The link is not there, but it mentions even movies like Silence of the Lambs the movie called, kyonki main jhooth nahi bolta, It was a copy from Liar.
Acharya Prashant: The list is very long. In fact, on Spotify, I think there is a playlist dedicated to copied songs. It’s a huge playlist where first they play the copied song and then the original one. And it's a huge playlist.
Questioner: So yes, in Bollywood music copying. And moving on even to other domains, especially academia, and that is where I think it is…
Acharya Prashant: Research patent.
Questioner: …something more damning. From that history that we talked about, because it says India has one of the largest rates of retractions of publications.
Acharya Prashant: And they’re retracted because of some kind of fraud.
Questioner: Either fraud or fake peer review or plagiarism.
Acharya Prashant: Mostly fake peer review. So our professors, our teachers, are publishing fake papers that are copied, and an entire ecosystem has been developed even to obtain fake peer reviews and other kinds of approvals.
Now contrast this with academic output like the Iron Pillar at Mehrauli. It was built to withstand corrosion. It is a remarkable feat. It’s literally a standing testimony to academic brilliance. You cannot have that kind of metallurgy without a sound academic base.
Have you heard of Wootz steel?
Questioner: Don’t recall exactly.
Acharya Prashant: It’s a high-carbon steel. India, South India in particular, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, and parts of modern Karnataka. They were exporting it for centuries to Arabia and Europe. The Damascus sword, which is built of steel derived from Wootz steel that was very native to India. And even as it was being exported, Europe, in spite of all their attempts to reverse engineer, could never come to the original technology. In fact, the original technology, I think, stands lost, at least to some extent.
It was a high-carbon steel, very tough, very strong. It had a particular signature pattern on the surface, almost like that of flowing water. And that is the India we are coming from.
Questioner: We’re talking about that time.
Acharya Prashant: Yes. The cradle, the crucible of innovation, has now come to a point where it can’t write proper research papers, get patents, or even write a song.
Questioner: Not just small institutions, even IITs, and to some extent IISc, everywhere there is…
Acharya Prashant: Heard that reports that a lot of papers from IIT’s have been retracted.
Questioner: There was an incident where 58 papers were retracted in one go.
Acharya Prashant: And not for exactly honorable reasons.
Questioner: Yes.
Acharya Prashant: But I'll repeat: let all this research, let all this, not convince you that we are inferior in some sense, or that we are condemned to remain inferior. Given your academic background and your long stint in the US, it will become easy for you to think that India is a declared and hopeless laggard. You should not come to that kind of conclusion.
India has been an innovator. India has been greatly original. Think of Charaka. Think of Sushruta. Think of rhinoplasty. Think of surgical methods. And all that was not a fluke. That was being described as a proper method of medicine. So we know how to be creative. Just that we’ll have to get rid of a lot of cultural nonsense.
Questioner: So this dichotomy is basically because of cultural decline.
Acharya Prashant: You see, if you do not respect originality, if you do not like rebellious minds, there can be no creativity. And that’s why I’m again and again naming culture. Our culture does not like deviants. We do not like dissent or dissenters. We love those who toe the line. We want to follow safe, secure, confirmed patterns. Is the groove safe and comfortable enough? And I’ll stay in that. And that’s not the way you can get anything new, anything fresh.
So that’s the culture that needs to be disrupted. And if that is disrupted, India knows how to be creative. We have done that in the past. We’ll do it once again.
Questioner: That’s what I find remarkable in your explanation also, because mostly when you talk about these things, people will say education will fix it.
Acharya Prashant: No. Not just education. You’re talking of the IITs. You see, how many even from the IITs are truly creative? Look at our startup ecosystem. Look at the apps we are producing. Look at the tech work we are doing. I’m not sure whether we can really call it groundbreaking or creative or greenfield. Difficult to say that. Or even if that is there, that’s a very small part.
Questioner: Even in the startup ecosystem, most tech startups in India are mostly cloning.
Acharya Prashant: Most tech startups are cloning what has already happened in the West.
Questioner: The big ones.
Acharya Prashant: Yes. So it’s not about education. You must see it is about the culture of the land. And this culture is a very unfortunate product of centuries of deprivation, defeat, slavery, lack of education, lack of prosperity. All that has come together to produce what we call popular Indian culture today. And that culture is not conducive to originality.
Questioner: It has to be because…
Acharya Prashant: We just like to bend, bow, and kneel down. That’s not the way of the rebel.
Questioner: I was even reading about a case where educated people, even people who go abroad, get their degrees from Stanford, even though they have that cultural baggage and resort to all kinds of things. Like fakery and…
Acharya Prashant: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Even our diaspora is not known to be really creative. They are known to be good workers. They are known to be law-abiding citizens. They are known to be nice, decent, pliant people, but they are not known to be disruptors, even abroad, because they can move out of India, the Indian culture doesn’t move out of them.
What we need is Indian philosophy. What we need is Indian rigor. What we need is the sharp Indian mind. What we need is the Indian kind of inquiry that challenges every possible notion, that challenges even sacredness. That’s true Indianness, and that’s what we find in our philosophies, the Ṣaḍdarśana.
The talking of Ṣaḍdarśana, one is reminded of Rishi Kaṇāda, the Vaiśeṣika darśana. He was talking of atoms there, giving a conceptual framework. Obviously, he couldn’t have proved it in a lab; the wherewithal wasn’t present. But he had the foresight to see that it is all coming from something very, very granular but invisible. He was believing in something in a logical way, not in a way of superstition. He was positing something so granular it cannot be seen with the naked eye, but forms the ground of all reality. That’s what the Vaiśeṣika darśana is.
So we have the philosophy. We have also, in some sense, the tradition of inquiry, if at all inquiry can be called a tradition. But the way the whole environment is today, it does not facilitate inquiry, and that’s the problem.
Questioner: Even when we talk about innovation that has happened earlier, people have random examples like flying chariots. We don’t talk about the genuine.
Acharya Prashant: And that’s so insulting, so insulting to the real innovation and innovators.
“We had nuclear technology two thousand years back. Our Vedas contain the secrets of the internet and all the mysteries of the universe.”
Why are you discrediting those who were actually innovative and there is no dearth of actual innovators and original thinkers in Indian history? What we need to do is rather read about them and be inspired. Instead of knowing actual innovators we conjure castles in the air and say, “Our forefathers were so great, they raised those castles.” Then the world laughs at us. Why do we want to become the laughingstock of the world? I don’t quite understand.
Questioner: It eventually leads to numbers like this: we have only 0.64% of GDP spent on R&D, whereas the US is at 3.5%. Even China is at 2.5%. China.
Acharya Prashant: 2.5% of a base that’s five times bigger. 2.5% of a base that is 5 times bigger. And how much is India's, 5.5%?
Questioner: .64
Acharya Prashant: .6%, right? So if the base is taken as 1, then this is 0.6, and that is 2.5 into 5, which makes it 12.5.
Questioner: And the population is comparable.
Acharya Prashant: And the population is comparable. So this is 0.6 compared to 12.5. That makes it almost 18–20 times per capita. Given the same kind of population, per capita, China is spending 18 times more on research. That’s an attitude. That’s reverence to knowledge and originality and discovery and research.
We have lost that. We feel we already know everything. We feel, “Oh, the past already contains all the goodies. We are already Vishwaguru. Why do we need to reinvent the wheel?”
We do need to do that. And that’s not called reinventing the wheel. That’s called genuine inquiry. That’s called honest research. We need to do that, and we can do that. We must remember this. Because either extreme is problematic. On one extreme, you say, “Oh, we are incapable. Therefore, we will copy, cheat, plagiarize.” On the other extreme, you say, “We don’t need to be innovative because we have already had it all in the past.”
Now, both these extremes are debilitating. We need to be honest with the facts. Yes, we have had greatness in the past, but when it comes to the present, there is not much to speak of. So it’s the present we need to work on.
Questioner: Our ranking in the Global Innovation Index is 38th. China is now in the top 10. I’m bringing up China because China is what…
Acharya Prashant: You need to bring up. That’s it.
Questioner: In other cases, you may have some excuses, but China, which was very similar to us in the 1980s, is even worse actually.
Acharya Prashant: Not practically, independent at much the same time as we did. GDPs were comparable almost till 1990. Per capita, we were ahead of them till 1986 or ’88. So obviously, we have to benchmark ourselves against China. And China is not just a competitor or a threat. It’s also a mirror.
Questioner: Even the IT services model mentioned in India is mostly back-office kind of work.
Acharya Prashant: We need more self-respect. We need less fear. We need to feel bad about just prostrating. Copying should come as an affront. It should hurt one’s own inner dignity. It’s not about escaping or not being caught by others. It’s about, first of all, living with a certain respect for oneself. That’s what we need today. We seem to have developed a very flexible spine. That needs to change.
Questioner: Eventually, when it came out on social media and all the ruckus was created, then something was done.
Acharya Prashant: I know, there are a lot of attempted cover-ups. And that makes the whole thing even more abominable. It would be much better to simply own up, offer regrets, and try to improve. That would be much better.
But finally, as you pile up these reams, I would reiterate: with every new kid is born a fresh possibility. We were great even in the times of our greatness. There were pockets of greatness. The popular culture already had seeds of decadence. The opportunity was present then. Some people made use of it, not all people. Even today, the opportunity is present. We require at least some people to make use of it. And maybe that will inspire the rest of the nation, and hopefully the entire world.
So there is no need to feel crestfallen or inferior. We just need to get down and work. Some self-esteem, some dignity is needed, and fearless inquiry, that would do it for us. It’s not all that tough.
Questioner: Thank you.
