Education Push Needed to Drive Growing India-U.S. Tech, Defense Collaboration

A growing U.S.-India partnership on technology and defense will require greater educational collaboration and a deeper focus on fostering cross-border innovation in key emerging sectors.

That was the thrust of early panels at the February USA-India Business Summit at Georgia Tech, where experts made the case that the world’s two largest democracies see their interests ever more intertwined amid China’s rise and other concerning shifts in the geopolitical landscape.

While India retains a fiercely independent foreign policy that often frustrates the U.S. on issues like Russia’s war in Ukraine, the countries’ defense partnership has grown exponentially in recent years, partly as an acknowledgment of India’s strategic position and as a nod to shared values.

In May 2022, President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the U.S.-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET), which officially launched in 2023 and is now housed under their respective National Security Councils.

The agreement calls for strengthening innovation ecosystems to seize new frontiers like artificial intelligence and quantum computing while developing a roadmap for joint defense-industry production and forging a new framework for semiconductor cooperation.

In his keynote address at the annual UIBS hosted in partnership with Georgia Tech CIBER, Indian Consul General Ramesh Babu Lakshmanan said that this agreement had already borne fruit, as a billion-dollar deal to allow GE to produce fighter jet engines in India in partnership with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited was approved during Mr. Modi’s May 2023 state visit.

The consul general said that such technology transfers are crucial to building capacity in India’s defense sector, and that India’s strategic focus on the intersection between education and defense is now just scratching the surface of its potential.

Georgia already benefits from the partnership, as Lockheed-Martin’s Marietta plant makes C-130 transport planes with empennages (tail wings) produced in Hyderabad through a joint venture with Tata Aerospace.

Especially in this sector, more collaborative research and development is necessary to foster innovation and safeguard intellectual property, said Vivek Lall, CEO of General Atomics Global Corp., an aerospace- and energy-focused defense contractor.

Mr. Modi in 2023 quipped that AI should stand for “America-India,” given the prospect of “marrying the technology technological prowess of the U.S. with the talent and capability in India to build trust,” Mr. Lall said.

India-U.S. cooperation “will also define the future of open innovation, which has been the hallmark of the post-Cold War era,” Mr. Lall added in a speech delivered virtually from San Diego. “And as it continues to thrive in India, it’s heartening to notice that self-reliance has been applied across all sections of industrial activity and the need to expand India’s scientific and technological capabilities are being translated into action through a national thought process. And I think the U.S. is a perfect partner in that collaboration.”

In aerospace, disciplines like instrumentation, machine learning and cybersecurity will have to be married with manufacturing techniques and R&D funding across borders, and institutions like Georgia Tech are at the center of this knowledge transfer, Mr. Lall said.

“These are all areas with enormous spinoff potential and should be emphasized in any attempt to grow and improve the countries’ talent pool, whether in India or the U.S.,” he added.

India has always been a key sending nation for students destined for the U.S., but its role has become even more vital as the number of Chinese students coming to the U.S. has consistently declined.

India in 2023 surpassed China for the first time since 2009/10 as the top sending nation for foreign graduate students arriving in the United States, according to the annual Open Doors report of the Institute for International Education.

These educated young people are helping fuel a startup boom in India that has attracted international attention in recent years — and sets the foundation for further exchanges, Mr. Lall said.

Prasad Joshi, a senior vice president heads up global innovation for tech giant Infosys but is based out of Atlanta, said a new pool of India-born, U.S. trained talent is now heavily engaged in the bilateral relationship.

“Many of us have children who have actually grown up in India but have American passports, so there is a beautiful mix that has occurred over the last several decades, which to me is the foundational element of where we as a society are heading,” Mr. Joshi said.

U.S. tech giant Amazon, whose highly profitable Amazon Web Services cloud division subsidizes its massive retail operation, committed during Mr. Modi’s visit to Washington last June to increase its investment in India to $26 billion by 2030, up from a $10 billion commitment founder Jeff Bezos made in 2020.

AWS, says cloud modernization leader Raj Sachde, is working to democratize artificial intelligence, opening up its tools for experimentation while offering more than 100 courses in AI and cloud development.

The AI revolution will displace many tech workers, but up-skilling them to make use of the technology on the whole should boost their earning potential significantly, he said.

Mr. Sachde’s comments came months before Amazon came under fire for using up to 1,000 Indian workers to power its supposedly AI-supported Just Walk Out retail outlets.

Amazon, he said, has committed to training 3 million Indian students and supporting jobs by enabling hundreds of thousands of merchants to sell on the platform. Amazon has also committed to enabling $20 billion in Indian exports.

To learn more about the 14th USA-India Business Summit — Technology Convergence: Challenge, Response — and see the full speaker lineup, go here.