India’s quantum computing ambitions present a study in strategic paradox
Amid the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, it’s time to evaluate where India stands in the arena of frontier technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), semiconductors, robotics, genomics, the Internet of Things and quantum computing, to name a few.
China spent $98 billion on AI in 2025, out of which the government expenditure was $56 billion. Five US-based private companies — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle — will collectively invest $700 billion in 2026. In comparison, the Indian government will spend $1.2 billion over five years on its AI Mission.
China spent $38 billion on semiconductors in 2025, while India has committed to spend $0.12 billion in 2026-27 on the India Semiconductor Mission 2.0. The Union Budget has allocated an additional $0.96 billion for the Modified Programme for Development of Semiconductor and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem. It is quite evident that India’s outlays belie its rhetoric.
Now take the case of quantum computing, a fundamental fourth Industrial Revolution technology. India’s quantum computing ambitions, articulated with considerable fanfare through the National Quantum Mission (NQM) and its Rs 6,000-crore (nearly $670 million) outlay, present a study in strategic paradox.
On paper, India has acknowledged that quantum technologies are not merely a scientific frontier but the bedrock of 21st-century geopolitical power. In practice, the gap between this acknowledgment and the reality of India’s R&D ecosystem is a bridge too far.
Between 2000 and 2018, India published around 1,700 papers on quantum technologies. China published around 12,000; the US about 13,000. When the metric shifts from quantity to quality, the proportion of papers in the top 10% most cited globally, India ranks 20th. China ranks third; the US is first. Only 9% of India’s quantum computing publications penetrate this upper echelon, compared to 29.1% for the US and 14.6% for China. In patenting, the picture is even bleaker. Between 2015 and 2020, India filed 339 quantum patents. China filed 23,335, the US 8,935. India ranks ninth globally.
The NQM ambitiously targets a 50-1,000 physical qubit quantum computer by the end of the decade. This remains a chimera unless we are prepared to confront the arithmetic of the present. India currently employs an estimated 5-10 principal investigators working on quantum computing hardware. For context, a single mid-tier American university lab often hosts more. These investigators support perhaps 300-400 PhD students across the entire quantum technology spectrum.
China’s University of Science and Technology alone operates a Division of Quantum Physics and Quantum Information with hundreds of researchers, multi-disciplinary teams of physicists, engineers and materials scientists working in integrated physical centers — not virtual hubs scattered across institutions with procedural handbrakes on every import.
Indian R&D labs import around 90% of the critical subsystems required for quantum computing: dilution refrigerators, high-purity silicon-germanium substrates, arbitrary waveform generators, specialized lasers and cryogenic components. Last year, Europe initiated a review of outward FDI in critical security technologies, with quantum among the top three areas under scrutiny. Export controls on quantum components are tightening globally. The US has already signaled that cryogenic systems are moving to controlled lists. India’s response? A procurement regime which mandates that Global Tender Enquiry (GTE) exemptions are still ad hoc.
The human capital crisis is deeper. India produces over 91,000 graduates annually in fields relevant to quantum technology. This places us second globally, behind only the EU. Yet this statistic masks a rot. These graduates are not being converted into quantum engineers. The reason is brutally simple: there are no jobs. Not in academia, where permanent faculty positions are stagnant and postdoctoral fellowships in quantum hardware are scarce. Not in the industry, where Indian IT services firms are building “quantum practices” that consist primarily of running Qiskit tutorials on IBM’s cloud.
This funding fallacy is the heart of the matter. India’s total NQM budget is around $670 million over eight years. China’s estimated investment is $15 billion. Japan committed $7.4 billion in 2025 alone. Germany, the UK, France and the Netherlands all outspend India manifold. We are attempting to build gods with tools we refuse to fund. You cannot build a 1,000-qubit superconducting processor on a diet of crumbs. Superconducting qubits require Josephson junction fabrication at nanometer precision, ultra-low-loss dielectrics and control electronics with picosecond timing accuracy.
A nation that cannot fabricate its own qubits cannot secure its own data. Post-quantum cryptography is a mere protocol patch. If a fault-tolerant quantum computer emerges in the next decade, and the US, China and Europe are racing towards it, India’s encrypted state secrets, financial infrastructure and military communications will be rendered transparent. The Indian armed forces currently rely on symmetric encryption and public key infrastructure that Shor’s algorithm (a quantum algorithm for factoring integers) will eviscerate. The timeline for topological qubits, once dismissed as decades away, has compressed.
The DRDO’s DIA-CoEs (centers of excellence) are laudable initiatives, but they are not yet integrated into a national mission rhythm that forces transition from TRL3 to TRL7 (technology readiness levels) within defined timelines. In contrast, the Russian Skolkovo model, the European CERN Venture Connect and the US National Quantum Initiative’s 14 research centers are operating systems for technological sovereignty. India’s NQM hubs remain, in large part, virtual collections of existing grants rather than physical, co-located, multi-disciplinary foundries.
The procedural rot runs deep. The GTE process delays equipment procurement by two to six months. When a dilution refrigerator costs $3 million and requires six months to install, a six-month procurement delay is a project killer. Maintenance contracts for imported lasers and cryostats are rarely pre-funded; equipment fails, and labs shut down for four months while components are shipped to Europe or Japan for repair.
The most dangerous delusion is that quantum computing is a software problem. In fact, it is a materials science problem, a cryogenics problem, a microwave engineering problem, a semiconductor fabrication problem. India’s failure in the field of semiconductors, despite prescient warnings dating back to the 1990s, is now being repeated on the quantum front.
The Department of Space and ISRO succeeded because they built an integrated, mission-mode vertical. The Department of Atomic Energy succeeded because the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre controlled the fuel cycle. Quantum technology was handed to the Department of Science and Technology, which historically funds curiosity-driven research, not national security-driven engineering.
The NQM is not a quantum leap but a down payment on a down payment. It cannot, at the current velocity, produce a 1,000-qubit computer, a satellite-based QKD (quantum key distribution) network spanning 2,000 km or a single-photon detector that competes with ID Quantique. The government must put its money where its mouth is.
(Manish Tewari is a Lok Sabha MP and former Union Minister of India)
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