Stability and Institutions Will Define India’s
Future Power
Lt Gen Shokin Chauhan (Retd) PVSM, AVSM, YSM, SM, VSM
Former Director, General, Assam Rifles
Forecasting is always difficult. But what I can say with conviction is that India in 2035 will indeed be a very different place. As I look across this hall, I see many grey hairs like mine, but I also see a great many young faces. And it is to them that I address myself first. You have decades of decisions ahead of you — decades of risk, of building, and of becoming. The long arc of your professional life is still unfolding. All those years now lie behind me.
I have spent many of those years on distant frontiers — on the Siachen Glacier, in conflict zones, and later in negotiating rooms with insurgent leaders — carrying what I would call the long, silent responsibility of command. That is why today I speak not of ambition alone, but of its consequences. We often look at 2035 as though it were a distant horizon. In reality, it is less than a decade away — roughly 3,000 days. In strategic planning, that is just one cycle. In command terms, it is just one tenure. But in a soldier’s life, that can be the difference between stability and chaos.
The India of 2035 is already being shaped — not by the rhetoric of politicians, but by the decisions taken in boardrooms, ministries, campuses, and institutions like yours today. India is no longer an emerging economy watching the world from its periphery. We are today, and will continue to be, an economic power, a central technology hub, a pivotal diplomatic voice. But with that comes an unsparing truth: growth brings scrutiny, visibility brings vulnerability, and vulnerability, if left unmanaged, can end in chaos.
Today, growth, security, diplomacy, and technology no longer operate in silos. We are one integrated national whole. A cyber breach can unsettle markets. A border incident can influence investor sentiment. A technological breakthrough can alter geopolitical balance overnight. So the question before us is at once simple and supremely difficult: Can India convert its large scale into genuine strength, and its opportunity into durable stability?
Let me speak about the changing nature of power. Over the last year, we have witnessed the rules-based international order shifting towards a negotiation-based one. All the norms we assumed as settled over the last five decades since World War II are now being contested. Agreements have become transactional. Influence is asserted, tested, and recalibrated. Power itself has changed shape — it is no longer just military or economic. It is technological, informational, and digital. A single malicious line of code can disrupt more effectively than troops on a border. A startup algorithm can move markets faster than any traditional institution. Supply chains are being rewired. Efficiency is no longer enough — resilience is equally paramount.
Allow me to speak a little personally. While in uniform, I spent many years on India’s borders — in Kashmir, in the northeast — in places where maps were not abstractions but living realities. I have seen my young soldiers stand guard at minus 35 degrees on the Siachen Glacier, waist-deep in snow, far from their families. I have written letters to parents who would never see their children again. I have stood at funerals where a mother’s silence was heavier than any weapon I have ever carried. I have cremated my soldiers as a father would cremate his sons.
In Kashmir in the year 2000, I was commanding my unit in the mountains of Banihal at 14,000 feet. We had just had a violent encounter with Pakistani terrorists who had infiltrated across the border, and I had lost three of my soldiers. Nearby was a village that had very likely been complicit in our ambush. My soldiers were understandably angry, frustrated, and hurt — they wanted to vent their grief at that village. But I said no. I stood before them and I said that no innocent civilian would be harmed. Not while I was their commanding officer. If they had to go there, they would have to go over my dead body. Suffice it to say that none of us moved.
Leadership is not about giving orders. It is about absorbing emotion and channelling anger into discipline. We reorganised, trained harder, and fifteen days later returned to the same ground — and eliminated the same terrorists who had killed my soldiers. We returned not just victorious, but honourable. Trust was earned that week not by force, but by restraint.
Similarly, when I served as Chairman of the Ceasefire Monitoring Group in Nagaland from 2018 to 2021, I often sat across the table from the same insurgent leaders I had spent decades hunting. On my very first meeting, the head of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland told me bluntly that they hated the Indian Army and would not cooperate with me. That was how my negotiation career began. But after three years of constant conversation and consistent engagement, when I was finally leaving, they went to the Government of India and said: if General Chauhan leaves, we will not negotiate with you. What changed? Listening changed. Consistency changed. Stability is not softness. These are strategic investments.
Peace is a strategic investment, not a weakness. Economic growth cannot survive without internal stability. When our Prime Minister speaks of Viksit Bharat, we must remember there can be no Viksit Bharat without Surakshit Bharat. Citizens must be able to seek fairness, employees must seek trust, and the price of instability is always paid in economic currency.
On frontiers, the clarity of intent is everything. Orders must be simple. Objectives must be unambiguous. Complexity in direction leads to paralysis in execution — and the same, I am certain, applies to business. Empower those closest to the problem. Decentralise execution within a clear strategic framework. In the armed forces, we call it mission command — or what the Germans once called Auftragstaktik: intent at the top, initiative at the bottom.
Strong nations are built on institutions, not personalities. Strong companies endure because of systems, not charisma. In the army, commanders change; the institution remains. Doctrine, training, culture — they outlast individuals always. The true test of leadership is not how you perform while in office. It is how your organisation performs after you leave. India’s rise to 2035 will depend less on individual brilliance and more on institutional depth — in governance, regulation, corporate culture, and academia.
Look at India’s neighbourhood. Myanmar is gripped by continuous strife, with sixteen to eighteen insurgencies eating at its vitals — a strife that bleeds into our own northeast through porous borders and shared tribal ties. Bangladesh faces elections fraught with anticipated violence. Pakistan has remained in a state of conflict for the last sixty years. Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives — the same instability echoes. In every direction, India is surrounded by nations that are unstable. We are, in truth, the only miracle — the only politically stable and economically successful story in this entire region. That India must be protected, because without a stable India, 2035 will remain just a dream.
Security and business are not separate lanes. A stable neighbourhood multiplies growth; an unstable one taxes it. Strategic foresight must extend beyond domestic markets. Regional engagement is not charity — it is strategy. India’s demographic dividend — with over 65 percent of our population below 35 — is often celebrated. But demographics are potential, not a guarantee. Untrained youth can become destabilising forces. Trained, disciplined youth become a national strength. We sweat in peace so that we bleed less in war. Repetition builds instinct. Discipline builds cohesion. Ethics build trust. Long-term competitiveness depends not merely on capital but on culture. And culture compounds — I have seen it with my own eyes — faster than any capital can.
I am 68 years old — almost as old as MMA. When I look at you all, I feel a quiet envy. You will shape the India of 2035 far more than my generation ever will. I have seen war; you will see technological revolution. I have defended our physical borders; you will defend our digital ones — guarding our supply chains, data flows, and institutional integrity. But one principle remains unchanged: character matters, clarity matters, coherence matters.
India’s rise is not inevitable. History is full of nations that appeared ascendant and then faltered. We possess the capability, the talent, the opportunity. The challenge is alignment — aligning leadership, institutions, and intent. When I stood with my soldiers in those freezing nights on our frontiers, they did not ask me if the task was easy. They only asked if it was necessary, and then continued to stand guard. Today, that task before India is not easy — but it is necessary. If we align growth with stability, ambition with ethics, power with responsibility, then 2035 will not just be an aspiration. It will be an outcome. And when India stands tall, remember: it will not be built by slogans or by one generation alone. It will be built by the choices we make today. Jai Hind.
Mr. Gopal Srinivasan
Chairman & Managing Director, TVS Capital Funds (P) Limited
This morning, many of you will have glanced at the news and seen that global AI expenditure this year is expected to reach $700 billion. That is roughly 25 times what India spends on R&D annually. Consider one further number alongside that: India accounts for 10 percent of the world’s usage of AI bots, 42 percent of code written in India is now generated on AI — and yet we hold only 0.2 percent of the world’s GPU capacity. That gap is precisely the conversation I want to have with you today.
The changing global paradigm is now a permanent condition. Every year you could convene on this theme and it would be entirely valid. The question is not whether the world is changing — it is how India progresses within that permanent state of change. If there is one paradigm India is about to grasp, convincingly and finally, it is pure R&D and innovation. It is the one area we have consistently missed.
Read the Nobel Prizes in Economics over the last seven years — from Paul Romer to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. The common thesis is unambiguous: only those countries that invest deeply in technological innovation have the ability to create a strong, sustainable, scalable economy. If India is to be the world’s second or first largest economy by 2050, it will be because Indian talent innovated and created a technological edge that is today absent but clearly part of our future.
Let me repeat the numbers because they bear repeating. India spends 0.75 percent of GDP on R&D — one-fifth of what the United States spends, with more than 60 percent of that coming from the government. South Korea, China — they overspend us by every measure. Our entire national R&D expenditure is one-third of what Amazon spends each year, and one-half of Google’s annual R&D budget. Despite record domestic patent filings last year, our global patent footprint remains embarrassingly thin. We know all of this. We read it every day. And yet here we are, asking why India hasn’t produced a Google.
My answer is that we are standing at the very doorstep of going in that direction — and that is what I want to speak about. What Nobel laureates have made clear in their work is that only government impetus creates national momentum in R&D. In the United States, it was the National Science Foundation — consistent federal investment in non-defence R&D through universities — that spurred their economic miracle. India is beginning to move in precisely that direction.
We all know the JAM trinity — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile — and UPI, which now processes close to a billion transactions a day. But I want to emphasise the R&D Innovation Fund announced by the government: a commitment of one trillion rupees, disbursed over five years at 20,000 crores per year, at 3 percent interest rates, exclusively for R&D and innovation. Rarely in the world has a nation seen a commitment of this scale and this specificity. When blended with private capital, the multiplier effect should produce two to three trillion rupees of innovation investment flowing into this country.
I happen to sit on one of the investment committees disbursing from those funds, and what we are seeing on the ground is quite extraordinary. Yes, it is a great many young ideas. Yes, eight out of ten companies we invest in may fail. But the other two are going to change this country — and inspire many others to do the same.
Consider Sarvam AI: a 200-billion parameter model built for just 450 crores, capable of operating across eleven Indian languages with a voice recognition engine that can understand Indian accents even on a crowded bus. That is not a lot of money. Or consider Bharat Gen, which is poised to become India’s foundational large language model — a trillion-parameter model that has so far consumed around 1,000 crores plus GPU support from government. Innovation is not about the size of the wallet. It is about conviction and consistency of effort.
India today has around 30,000 to 40,000 GPUs. By 2030, we will need at least a million to reach just 2 percent of global GPU capacity. These are early green shoots, but they are real. The SIDBI Fund of Funds — a 10,000 crore initiative launched in 2016 — created 50 new venture capital firms in this country. That same 10,000 crores generated over 50,000 crores of blended capital invested in startups: five rupees of private money for every rupee the government put in. The one lakh crore fund will replicate and multiply that effect across the innovation ecosystem.
And this money is not exclusively for startups. It is available to India’s largest companies willing to acquire patent portfolios, invest in intellectual property, or put a large-scale R&D project on the ground. That is game-changing. This is the beginning of a new India where government-spurred initiatives inspire innovation across the entire economy.
What troubles me — and I will be frank — is this: over the last five years, Indian IT services companies have returned 72,000 crores to shareholders through buybacks. When Bharat Gen needed 1,000 crores and Sarvam needed 450 crores, that money was not forthcoming from those same companies. DeepSeek’s actual cost — setting aside their marketing number — was roughly 15,000 crores: they bought 50,000 GPUs and created a DeepSeek moment, a phrase that has now entered our vocabulary like WhatsApp. We could have done that. A fraction of those 72,000 crores in buybacks could have produced India’s foundational LLM for the very IT companies that benefit most from it. That confidence — the confidence General Chauhan spoke about so powerfully — is what India at the corporate level has been missing.
I come here today with genuine inspiration and hope that we are shedding that past. India’s talent is not a television show. It is a reality — sitting right here in this room, in the back rows, in IIT Madras research labs, in the Mahindra Research Valley at Maraimalainagar producing electric vehicles that are climbing sales charts, in Agnikul right here in Chennai, which has already launched a suborbital space vehicle. This cultural shift is at its very beginning — and the theme of driving progress in a permanently changing global paradigm could not be more apt.
So I urge each of you to do one specific thing. If the BSE 500 makes roughly 12 percent margin and returns 50,000 crores annually through CSR at a 2 percent level, ask yourself: why can every single MMA member not consider spending 1 or 2 percent of that 12 percent on something innovative within whatever business they run? Whether you are serving coffee, making idlis, doing AI, manufacturing auto parts, producing construction materials or specialty glass — does it matter? Spend that extra 1 or 2 percent of revenue on R&D. That is the only ask.
Change starts with each of us. It does not start by staring at screens and lamenting. The Gita tells us we must elevate ourselves by our own effort — we can be our own best friend, or our own worst enemy. At TVS Capital, we have already made that change: next week we will announce our first large investment in AI infrastructure because we believe that is the future of this country. I would urge each of you to find your version of that move.
On the question of whether discipline and innovation can coexist — which someone rightly raised — the answer is not merely that they can, but that neither is truly possible without the other. Discipline without innovation becomes stagnation. Innovation without discipline becomes chaos. China is the proof: both exist there, and both can exist here. When people see the opportunity around them, organisations adapt. The speed of change in India right now — a government committing 10,000 crores to rent GPUs, one trillion rupees to spur innovation — that message is unmistakably clear. Our task is to follow those footsteps and not be held back by the past. Let us go from Jai Jugad — our beloved culture of improvisation — to Jai Anusandhan: systematic, sustained, sovereign innovation. Be one drop in that great flood that is going to define this country’s place in the world as an innovative leader. Thank you. Jai Hind.
