The lunar mission’s success in landing the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon can inspire a private sector thriving on government contacts and contracts - not innovation, say Bloomberg Opinion’s Andy Mukherjee.
- for less than half the money Christopher Nolan spent on the movie Interstellar - its risk-averse private sector will hopefully be inspired to launch some moonshots of its own. Just beating investor expectations next quarter won’t get them ahead in the long game in artificial intelligence or new materials and energy.
The 12-fold jump in India’s national income in dollar terms over the past three decades has been largely a product of labour-cost advantage over the West and a growing role for finance in the domestic economy. While corporate bosses in Mumbai and New Delhi like nothing better than to talk about how the 21st century will belong to India, they don’t exactly care to expound on their own plans to make it happen.That’s because they don’t have one.
“Technology can and must be the great amplifier of our human potential, our humanity,” Vishal Sikka, the chief executive of Infosys, wrote in the software exporter’s 2015-16 annual report. The former SAP computer scientist, a co-author of a natural language processing patent, was talking about a small donation to a nonprofit lab in San Francisco.
Tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries spent US$363 million on R&D last financial year. This was 15 per cent more than the previous year, but still only 0.3 per cent of revenue. The kind of post-World War II technocratic revolution that American inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush would unleash in the United States with his landmark 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier, is still some distance away.
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