'India vs AI': PM Modi is busy creating jobs but ignoring AI takeover of China & US

The Indian government has prioritised large-scale employment generation through traditional industries, manufacturing, MSMEs, services, retail and public-sector hiring. While this boosts short-term job numbers, it diverts attention from AI-driven automation, which China and the US are adopting aggressively. These countries are replacing repetitive human tasks with machines, freeing up their workforce for high-value innovation roles. India’s hesitation to automate keeps productivity low and delays adoption of global technologies.

The US leads in frontier AI labs, GPUs, cloud hyperscalers and foundation models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and open-source giants. China, despite sanctions, has built its own domestic ecosystem with Hunyuan, ERNIE, Qwen, Spark and massive compute hubs across Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. India, meanwhile, still faces a severe GPU shortage, fragmented cloud infrastructure, and no nationwide compute grid. Without foundational infrastructure, India will struggle to compete in generative AI, robotics, or autonomous systems.

Global AI dominance comes from building large, sovereign foundation models. China and the US each have dozens. India has promising startups but no model at global scale, and most AI companies rely entirely on foreign compute and foreign LLMs. As long as India remains a consumer of AI models rather than a creator, it will not influence the global direction of AI or secure digital sovereignty.

China is replacing low-skill factory jobs with industrial robots, humanoids, autonomous forklifts, drone fleets and automated warehouses. The US has Tesla Optimus, Figure AI, Boston Dynamics and dozens of robotics labs building workforce automation for the next decade. India’s manufacturing sectors still rely on manual labour, minimal robotics, and legacy systems. Without automation, productivity cannot rise and Indian industries fall behind global competition.

In China and the US, governments act as massive early adopters of AI in defence, policing, healthcare, agriculture, logistics and public services. India, however, moves cautiously, procurement is slow, regulatory clarity is ongoing, and adoption varies across states. Without large-scale government deployment of AI, local ecosystems cannot scale or attract deep investment.

India produces world-class engineers, but most top AI researchers move to the US or Europe to work at OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google, Meta, Anthropic or Chinese frontier labs. Domestic universities lack high-end compute, modern research labs, or sufficient funding to retain talent. This brain drain ensures India loses the very innovators needed to build frontier AI systems.

India’s development model continues to focus on job-led growth, not automation-led productivity. Meanwhile, global economic power is shifting toward countries that master AI, robotics, semiconductor design and digital infrastructure. Without rapid investment in compute, chips, research, robotics and national AI platforms, India risks becoming the world’s largest tech consumer but not a tech creator.

PM Modi’s job-centric development strategy has political and economic benefits, but the world is entering a phase where AI, automation and robotics, not human labour, drive competitiveness. China and the US have already embraced this shift. If India does not accelerate its AI infrastructure, chip ecosystem and automation adoption, it may fall permanently behind in the global AI race.