The Talent Hunt

Matt Deitke, a 24-year-old AI prodigy, was recently hired at a record US$250 million (roughly Rs.2250 crores), payable over four years, by Meta Platforms Inc. Deitke had turned down Meta’s initial offer of US$125 million (roughly Rs. 1125 crores); Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to personally persuade Deitke, and double his offer, before Deitke agreed to join. Deitke’s is not an isolated case; according to insiders, Zuckerberg has compiled a list of talented researchers working in Silicon Valley’s AI labs, who are being offered packages in excess of US$100 million (roughly Rs.900 crores) to defect to Meta.

The tech billionaires of the last generation, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few, were all self-made, and created value out of nothing. India, which produces more than two crore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) graduates annually, boasts of no similar success story. No one can deny our talent; top US tech companies, Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Alphabet (Google) (Sundar Pichai), IBM (Arvind Krishna), Adobe (Shantanu Narayen), T-Mobile (Srinivas Gopalan, Micron Technology (Sanjay Mehrotra), Palo Alto Networks (Nikesh Arora), and Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Reshma Kewalramani), are helmed by Indians.

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Yet, despite the Government’s incentives, very few tech start-ups have done really well in India. Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, succinctly pointed out at the ‘Startup Mahakumbh’ in April 2025, that Indian start-ups were developing food delivery and online betting apps, while Chinese start-ups were developing machine learning, robotics and next-generation factories. Perhaps, the difference lies in the way Indians are taught to think ~ memorisation of facts, and rote learning are rewarded in examinations, while originality is frowned upon. Our companies seldom launch new products, relying mostly on copying goods being manufactured abroad. No wonder, mediocrity rules the roost; graduates that our universities churn out in abundance are mostly good only for basic repetitive jobs, and can never hope to command even one per cent of Deitke’s asking price. Donald Trump’s US$100,000 premium on H1-B visas is specifically designed to prevent such people from entering the US job market.

These anomalies would have been good only for table talk, had they not been directly related to our dream of becoming ‘Viksit Bharat’ in the next twenty-two years. History shows that a country becomes great if it truly excels in at least one field; the eighteenth and nineteenth century saw Britain forge ahead by virtue of its industrial development and military power, the twentieth century had the US lead in research and new technology, and the early twenty-first century has seen China emerge as the factory of the world. The Government aimed to bring India into the Viksit category by growing the manufacturing sector with initiatives like Make in India (2014), Production Linked Incentive (PLI) (2020) and Design Linked Incentive (DLI) (December 2021).

Make in India had two major objectives viz. creation of 10 crore new jobs in the manufacturing sector, and enhancing the share of manufacturing in GDP, from 15 to 25 per cent, in ten years. However, after ten years of Make in India, the share of manufacturing in GDP still hovers between 16 to 17 per cent, and there has been little employment generation in the manufacturing sector. Rather, according to NSSO sample surveys, manufacturing employment has declined from 12.6 per cent of total employment in 2011-12 to 11.4 per cent in 2022-23. PLI and DLI, have fared little better; even with a budget of Rs. 2.96 lakh crore, success has been partial ~ as revealed in its fourth review, PLI seems to have degenerated into promoting local ‘assembling’ of smartphones with imported components, resulting in huge export values, but little value addition.

An analysis would reveal that Government alone is not responsible for the limited success of its flagship initiatives. The Government liberalised the FDI regime, introduced single-window clearances, reduced compliance burdens, decriminalised a host of offences, drastically cut corporate tax rates, invested huge amounts in infrastructure development, and reduced both the Repo Rate and Cash Reserve Ratio, by 1 per cent in the last few months, but response from industry was sluggish; the Finance Minister loudly wondered why private investment in manufacturing was not forthcoming, and her Chief Economic Advisor rued the tendency of Indian industrialists to invest abroad, but not in India. However, there is a basic drawback with a development model based on manufacturing and exports, imagined by our planners.

Firstly, it is a concept copied from China, which had perfected it in the last fifty years. It served China well till the other countries noticed that China had raced ahead by flooding their markets with cheap goods, killing their manufacturing industries. Only recently, the US and Britain realised that their manufacturing bases had eroded; they were producing hardly any steel, the basic raw material for industry ~ US had produced only 88 million tonnes of steel in 2024, and UK a meagre 4 million tonnes, while China had produced more than 1 billion tonnes, and India had produced 150 million tonnes. Over the years, China took full advantage of the West’s laxity; till a week ago, despite being the world’s second largest economy, China graded itself as a ‘developing country’ at the WTO, that entitled it to a host of undeserved benefits. Significantly, the US had withdrawn China’s ‘developing country’ tag only in 2020 ~ at the end of the first Trump presidency.

With a wave of protectionism sweeping the world, there is little chance that India can replicate the Chinese model. Additionally, China became the factory of the world by operating at very thin margins, for example, when China was the sole producer of Apple iPhones, only four per cent of the profit on sale of an iPhone accrued to China. Of course, China made up by copying proprietary designs of its principals, and rolling out cheap substitutes of luxe products. Also, being a command economy, China could set prices to benefit itself and discourage rivals. Most importantly, as early as 2006, China realised that being a copycat, a fast follower or a “fat tech dragon”, could succeed only to a point, and so it formulated the “Outline of National Medium ~ and Long-term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006-2020),’ which identified innovation as the new national strategy. Great efforts were made to further this initiative, the Thousand Talents Plan (2008), aimed at bringing back expatriate scientists and researchers, was one such project.

The Thousand Talents Plan, offered returnees a one-time settlement bonus of up to 1 million yuan (Rs.1.25 crore), with additional research funding ranging from 3 (Rs.3.75 crore) to 5 million yuan (Rs.6.25 crore). Relocation packages included subsidised housing, paid return home trips, employment for spouses, and educational support for children. In the last ten years, more than 7,000 scientists and entrepreneurs, both Chinese and foreign, have taken up positions under the Thousand Talents Plan. No wonder, China has triumphed in high-tech industries, such as electric vehicles, clean energy and lean AI ~ and Trump has banned Chinese students from attending hi-tech courses in US universities.

A totally different ecosystem operates in India. Nobel Laureate Hargobind Khorana, wanted to work in India, but was never offered a suitable position. Instead of being called upon to play a role in policy formation, Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee, are routinely derided for their liberal views. Ace innovator and social reformer Sonam Wangchuk, has been jailed under the draconian National Security Act (NSA). Even investors get short shrift; after Amazon announced an investment of US$1 billion in India, the Union Commerce Minister lambasted Amazon, saying inter-alia, that Amazon was not favouring India by its investment, for added effect, the minister accused Amazon of predatory pricing. It is rather late in the day for India to join the AI race.

Also, India does not have the hundreds of billions of dollars required to buy top talent and infrastructure, to be a serious contender. However, many other avenues are open for innovation; agriculture being a prime example. Our agricultural productivity is one of the lowest in the world, enhancing it will transform agriculture from a subsistence activity to a remunerative one. Waterlogging, soil alkalinity etc. are problems waiting for a solution. Then, our dirty and overcrowded cities face myriad problems, which keep us from becoming ‘viksit’ ~ and which can be resolved by innovation. Finally, innovation is required to take us out of our present rut; as Henry Ford had said a century ago: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)