Rise of Indian AI innovation

This article is authored by Garima Bharadwaj, co-founder and CTO, Enlite.

For years, Made in India meant something specific in the technology conversation. It meant assembly, not architecture. It meant we built what others designed. That story is changing, and it is changing fastest in the places that get the least attention: The physical infrastructure that quietly runs our cities.

AI (Photo credit: Unsplash)

I build one piece of that infrastructure. My work sits inside what I think of as the nervous system of the built environment, the systems that decide how a building senses, responds and adapts. When we started, the solutions available in this space were rudimentary - wired controls, manual configuration, systems that had to be told what to do rather than systems that understood the building they lived in. We looked at that and decided it was worth disrupting. If buildings themselves could get smarter, so could the systems run them.

For years, Indian engineering meant customising someone else's design for local conditions. That is starting to reverse.

What is different now is that a new generation of Indian deep-tech companies is starting upstream. We are not adapting a western product for the Indian market. We are looking at Indian conditions, which are often harder and messier than the ones global products were designed for, and building solutions from first principles that end up being more robust everywhere.

Take building automation. Most intelligent BMS technology was designed for markets with stable power, predictable infrastructure and buildings that were wired for automation from day one. India has none of those luxuries. Our buildings are older, our power is less consistent, and retrofitting is the norm, not new construction. Solving for these constraints forced a different kind of engineering, one that had to be more resilient, more adaptive and less dependent on ideal conditions. The result is a solution that does not just work in India. It works better in the difficult, unpredictable environments that most of the world actually operates in.

There is no marketing behind that claim. Solve the harder problem first, and sooner or later, the rest of the world comes looking for your answer.

There is a pull toward work that is fast, visible and easy to demonstrate. That has long been the strength of a services economy. Deep-tech does not work that way. Building core engineering, the kind that touches physical infrastructure, energy systems and industrial processes, takes longer, costs more upfront and rewards patience over speed.

That is precisely why it matters more, not less, for India's technological independence. Software alone does not build sovereignty. A country that can design and manufacture the intelligent systems running its own buildings, factories and power grids is a country that is not dependent on someone else's infrastructure stack. Every controller we deploy, every line of code that manages energy consumption in an Indian building, is a small piece of that independence.

We have digitized tens of millions of square feet of built space and deployed thousands of intelligent controllers across more than a hundred clients, cutting the wiring and material footprint of buildings in the process. What we are really building is a sovereign stack, an entire chain of building controls conceived, engineered and owned in India, rather than licensed from elsewhere. Infrastructure that used to be imported know-how is now Indian-engineered, patented, and increasingly exported outward.

We talk often about India as a consumer of AI tools, and increasingly as a builder of AI products. We talk far less about India as an originator of the deep-tech that will quietly run the physical world for the next few decades, energy systems, buildings, manufacturing, logistics. Engineering rarely gets the spotlight that consumer AI does, but it is where the real independence gets built, one controller, one building, one system at a time.

That is the opportunity in front of us. Not to build a cheaper version of what already exists elsewhere, but to solve harder problems under harder constraints, and let the rest of the world discover that the Indian answer is often the better one. "Made in India" got us here. "Built for the World" is where deep-tech takes us next, and it will be defined less by any single product launch than by the accumulated, unglamorous work of engineers solving real problems, one building, one system, one line of code at a time.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Garima Bharadwaj, co-founder and CTO, Enlite.