India must maintain sovereignty, not become technological colony of West: Amitabh Kant

Former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant on Friday said India must maintain its sovereignty and not become a technological colony of the West.

While speaking at the Startup Mahakumbh, he emphasised the need to innovate in a nimble, cost-effective manner, and cautioned against adopting Western models that could lead to loss of India’s culture, identity, and civilisational strength.

Advertisement

“It’s very important for India to maintain its sovereignty in technological advancement and leading from the front, we must not become a technological colony of either the West or of any other country in the world. We must continue to innovate in a very nimble, in a very less energy-consuming, cost-effective manner,” the G20 Sherpa said.

He asserted that the country must build sovereign frontier models based on its own data sets and free of the West’s inherent biases.

“We will lose our civilisational strength. And therefore, it’s important that we must build on Indian data, on the data of our citizens.”

Kant also witnessed the launch of India Fintech Foundation (IFF)—the proposed self-regulatory organisation (SRO) for the fintech industry, also known as the SRO-Fintech Development Foundation (SROFT-DF).

“Innovation is the lifeblood of FinTech, and as we innovate, we must do so responsibly. The pivotal mechanism to foster ethical and responsible growth in fintech is the establishment of self-regulatory organisations. They play a crucial role in setting industry standards, and they enforce compliance and acting as a bridge between regulators and fintech companies,” he said.

“If innovation is not responsible, it could result in accidents. Therefore, it’s important that whatever innovation is taking place becomes responsible and SRO plays a very important role in that,” Viswanathan added.

The race for AI dominance is wide open, Kant remarked, urging Indian startups to focus on energy-efficient AI solutions using limited hardware computing power. He cited examples like DeepSeek’s open-source innovation as evidence of how nimble approaches can achieve significant breakthroughs at lower costs.

He advocated adopting the open-source approach as the way forward.

Commending India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI), Kant said India has demonstrated its ability to enable fast payments, credit access, stock market participation, and insurance–all within seconds via mobile platforms. He noted that integrating AI with DPI would be a game-changer for innovation in India.