funding for AI research in India seem to be forthcoming from private investors
Extra section in the book which looks at the reasons for China's success in tech sovereignty and comparison with india: But DeepSeek was not a freak phenomenon, nor the result of an isolated drive by China in the field of AI. China has systematically developed capabilities and brought about innovations in a number of other fields, surpassing the US and Europe in the production of high-quality scientific papers; the Economist terms it a “scientific superpower.” In the field of industry, as a commentator observes, “China has developed multiple tech-industrial ecosystems that overlap in terms of the firms and technologies involved…. China’s strength across multiple overlapping industries creates a compounding effect for its industrial policy efforts.”⁹¹
How this phenomenon emerged is a complex historical question requiring further study. In our view, it involves the legacy of sweeping social and political changes wrought in China in an earlier, socialist phase of its development; the impact of public expenditure on education and research in China’s later phase; the Chinese State machinery’s continued active regulation of private capitalists in the interest of sustained growth, thereby fostering a fiercely competitive environment in industry; and, partly as a result of all the above, the emergence of a breed of ambitious private entrepreneurs, often starting from scratch with very modest capital, but unwilling to be relegated to subordinate or dependent status in relation to the world’s dominant corporations. India’s development path, by contrast, has been marked by continuity and stagnation in property relations and social hierarchies; meagre State expenditures on education and research, with only a narrow section obtaining higher education of some quality; capture of State planning and regulatory institutions by private interests; and the persistence of a large capitalist class that emerged under colonial rule, drawn from a narrow social base and marked by a strong mercantile, rather than industrial, tendency. This different historical course helps explain the very different path followed and results achieved in technological development in China and India.