India does not lack brilliant engineers. It lacks the products that carry their brilliance to the world. Not one of the technologies that define modern life, the iPhone, Nvidia's chips, Google's search engine, Tesla's cars, was conceived in India. Yet India's software services exports reached a record $221.4 billion in 2025-26.

I put this puzzle to Sujeet Kumar, a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) member from the eastern state of Odisha, during the third episode of SAM Dialogues, the interview show I host for South Asia Monitor. He began his career as a software engineer at Infosys, one of the very companies at the center of the story.

A History Lesson, not an Excuse

His answer began with history. India opened its economy in 1991, more than a decade after China began its own reforms. China, he noted, chose manufacturing. India opened just as the global information technology industry was taking off, and the Y2K scare of the late 1990s, he observed, actually helped Indian IT.

With easy money flowing in, he said, the giants of the era, Wipro, Infosys, TCS and Satyam, never really focused on building products. Then he added a line that stopped me: "the best of minds, like yourself, were in the US."

He was right, and I am a data point in his argument. I earned my doctorate at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, came to Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow, and spent my career in the American diagnostics industry, where I was awarded 30 U.S. patents. All of that work was done in America. India trained the scientist; another country captured the inventions.

Numbers Behind the Diagnosis

The government's own figures support his account. The Economic Survey for 2025-26 puts India's spending on research and development at about 0.64 percent of GDP, against 2.5 to 5 percent in the United States, China and Israel.

That fits everything I learned in decades of industrial research. A services firm earns its margin this quarter on hours billed. A product company spends years funding experiments, most of which fail, before a single sale. Indian IT did not fail to build products. It succeeded so well at services that it never had to try.

Late to the AI Race, but not out of it

Manufacturing, he noted, is gaining ground, especially in defence, where exports reached a record 38,424 crore rupees in 2025-26.

On artificial intelligence, he said India is late to the race to build giant frontier models. The smarter path is contextual: small, localized models built for India's own developmental needs. He cited Sarvam AI and BharatGen, and the strategy is already bearing fruit. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Sarvam unveiled models of 30 and 105 billion parameters trained for Indian languages.

I would push his argument one step further. Contextual models are a sound entry point, but a product culture is not something a ministry can announce. It grows from patient private capital, tolerance for failure, and reasons for the best minds to build at home rather than abroad.

Products are also a Foreign-Policy Question

The same conversation turned to world affairs, and a single thread ran through his answers: independence. On the war in Ukraine, he rejected my framing as too black and white, pointing out that Prime Minister Modi is one of the few leaders able to talk to both President Putin and President Zelensky. On the conflicts in the Middle East, he returned to dialogue and diplomacy, and to the price the Global South pays when distant wars drive up the cost of fuel, fertilizer and food.

That is the language of strategic autonomy, and it connects directly to his economic diagnosis. Diplomatic visibility is easy to admire and cheap to produce; it is no substitute for measurable capacity. A country can only be as independent in its diplomacy as it is in its economy. A nation that imports its phones, its chips and much of its energy, will always have less room to manoeuvre than one that makes what the world needs.

Designed in Bengaluru?

Every iPhone carries a quiet boast on its back: Designed in California. India has the talent to earn a label of its own. The Indian MP's diagnosis explains why it has not happened yet; his optimism suggests it still can. The day a product the whole world wants carries the words "designed in Bengaluru," or Bhubaneswar, India's independence in world affairs will rest on something far stronger than skilful diplomacy.

The full conversation is available on South Asia Monitor.

(The author is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at mpreddy54@yahoo.com, https://lnkd.in/gn2zQJbs /mpreddyinsights.com)