For decades, India’s most talented engineers served like coolies for American corporations. Many were sent on H-1B visas to handle the work few others wanted: maintaining aging systems, cleaning up bloated codebases, migrating databases at odd hours, and keeping global enterprises running in the background. The arrangement generated prosperity and foreign exchange, and it built formidable Indian IT giants. Yet it also meant that too much of India’s technical talent was confined to sustaining other nations’ systems instead of building its own. Engineers were treated as low-cost labor rather than as co-creators of intellectual property — and then despised for supposedly taking American jobs. The trade-off was accepted because it delivered growth; it also postponed a deeper transformation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now forcing a reckoning, because the playing field has shifted, and for the first time in centuries, India has the tools to build its own future rather than serve someone else’s.
At the recent India AI Impact Summit, V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, called AI disruption a blessing in disguise for core engineers. He argued that India has invested heavily in training mechanical, civil, electrical, and biotech engineers, only to see them drift into generic IT roles because that’s where the jobs and money were, a misallocation of national resources. As AI automates coding, testing, documentation, and maintenance, that door closes. Core engineers will have stronger incentives to remain in their disciplines, reskill with AI, and apply it to real problems in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and medicine — precisely where India needs them.
They did not spend years mastering thermodynamics, structural mechanics, or bioengineering to waste their lives maintaining legacy systems. The move into IT services was often driven by opportunity and economic reality, not by a lack of ambition. AI now creates the opportunity to apply their skills to work that serves a broader purpose and demands deeper expertise. It opens the door to projects that are more creative, more technically rigorous, and more consequential. It allows engineers to return to deep science without becoming peripheral, turning computation into a powerful multiplier of their domain knowledge rather than a substitute for it.
I work with Kamakoti’s engineers through Vionix Biosciences, where IIT Madras teams are building the plasma physics and spectroscopy hardware for my company that has the potential to impact billions of lives. What stands out is not just their ambition, but their hunger — and their values. These engineers want to invent, not maintain; to build systems that matter, not service ones that already exist. They do this on modest university salaries, a fraction of what they could earn in the IT industry. They choose it because they want to solve real scientific problems and create technologies that improve lives on a large scale.
These values and that hunger are India’s real edge. They align directly with Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw’s New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments unveiled at the summit, which emphasize deploying frontier AI for the public good. The framework moves the focus away from raw scale, benchmarks, and speculative valuations and toward measurable impact, inclusion, and accountability. It calls for embedding intelligence into the systems that shape everyday life — health care, agriculture, infrastructure, and education — so that AI strengthens society rather than merely inflating market capitalisations.
That shift, however, only works if AI is treated as necessary infrastructure rather than hype, as a tool for strengthening society rather than a vehicle for greed and short-term profit.
That is because AI is like electricity, an enabler. On its own, it is neither good nor bad. Electricity transformed the world by lighting cities, powering factories, electrifying transportation, enabling modern health care, and shrinking distances through communication. It expanded productivity and improved daily life. AI can do the same. When embedded into real systems and fused with deep engineering — in health care, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture — it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach. Used wisely, it enlarges what societies are capable of.
India has all the necessary ingredients to make that happen: strong engineering institutions, deep mathematical talent, and massive-scale challenges in health care, environment, and infrastructure that few countries confront simultaneously. These are daily constraints on growth and quality of life. Addressing them requires engineers grounded in the fundamentals of physics, biology, and systems design, who use AI to deepen their expertise rather than replace it.
Why is India so important in the AI race? Because elsewhere, the incentives are skewed. In Silicon Valley, AI is increasingly about money — pouring billions into ever-larger models chasing marginal gains, benchmarks, and valuations. In China, AI is closely tied to surveillance systems, social credit architectures, and military applications. Neither trajectory will uplift humanity.
India can solve real problems that affect billions. By fusing frontier AI with deep engineering and grounding it in inclusive governance and public-purpose applications, it can embed intelligence into health care diagnostics at population scale, climate-resilient infrastructure, agricultural systems, water management, and energy grids. Done right, it can help tackle challenges for all of humanity, not just optimize the margins of a few.
Both V Kamakoti and Ashwini Vaishnaw are right about this moment: AI disruption is not a threat but a reset. Without doubt, it can move India from being the world’s maintenance crew to becoming one of its principal builders.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are personal
