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Andhra Pradesh's roadmap to become India's Deep Tech powerhouse

Andhra Pradesh's roadmap to become India's Deep Tech powerhouse

CM Nara Chandrababu Naidu and IT and HRD minister Nara Lokesh during the Quantum Valley workshop in Vijayawada on Monday.
CM Nara Chandrababu Naidu and IT and HRD minister Nara Lokesh during the Quantum Valley workshop in Vijayawada on Monday. Photo | Express
VIJAYAWADA: In a decisive step toward establishing Andhra Pradesh as a hub for emerging technologies, the State government, in collaboration with the National Quantum Mission, unveiled the Amaravati Quantum Declaration at the close of the Amaravati Quantum Valley (AQV) Workshop.
The event in Vijayawada brought together global minds, scientists, industry leaders, innovators, and startup visionaries to chart the future of quantum computing, sensing, secure communication, and ecosystem-building.
At the heart of the declaration is the creation of QChipIN, poised to become the country's largest open quantum testbed. Set to launch within the next 12 months at the new Amaravati Quantum Valley Tech Park, QChipIN will serve as a platform for piloting quantum solutions across critical sectors such as healthcare, banking, logistics, space, and defence.
The declaration lays out an ambitious timeline. By January 2026, it aims to install IBM's Quantum System Two. Within a year after that, three quantum computers using different qubit technologies are expected to go live, supported by the testing of 100 quantum algorithms. The longer-term vision is striking: AQV intends to reach a capacity of 1,000 effective qubits and conduct more than 1,000 algorithmic tests annually by 2029.
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On quantum technology, India has much to do. Global partnerships hold the key
On quantum technology, India has much to do. Global partnerships hold the key

Indian Express

time28 minutes ago

  • Indian Express

On quantum technology, India has much to do. Global partnerships hold the key

Written by Arun Teja Polcumpally On February 19, Microsoft unveiled Majorana 1, a quantum chip built on a novel state of matter known as topological conductors. CEO Satya Nadella remarked that the development of a fully functional quantum computer is now a matter of years, not decades. Much like the post-AlphaGo AI boom of 2016, quantum technology is poised to reshape global markets, security regimes, and digital governance. For India, this fast-paced technological shift raises a strategic question: How should it position itself as a key global player in quantum technology? The global quantum market value is estimated to be $ 100 billion by 2040, while the global quantum communication market size is predicted to be approximately $ 13.12 billion by 2034, expanding at a CAGR of 28.25 per cent from 2025 to 2034. Already, Volkswagen uses D Wave quantum computers in Spain for traffic route optimisation, and China has built a 1000-km quantum encrypted communication channel using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and post-quantum cryptography. Additionally, quantum technology is dependent on global supply chains of cryogenic systems, specialised lasers, and advanced quantum chip fabrication facilities, which are concentrated among a few countries like the US and China. This also shows the globally restrictive development of quantum technology. Countries that take the lead in developing quantum computers and encryption standards will gain a first-mover advantage, enabling them to shape global technology norms. These dynamics underscore India's urgent need to engage more proactively in the global quantum landscape. India launched the National Quantum Mission with a budget of $735 million in 2023, encouraging research and innovation in quantum computing, communication, sensing and materials. However, the scale of private sector investment in quantum technology reveals the nascent stage India is in. Private investment stands at US$30 million, significantly lagging behind the United States ($ 6940 million), Australia ($ 661 million), and South Korea ($ 95.5 million). India is also dependent on raw materials like indium and lacks dedicated fabrication units. A 2025 report by NITI Aayog noted that export restrictions are tightening around key components essential for quantum development. Simultaneously, the Quad Investors Network highlights India's shortage of skilled quantum engineers as a critical barrier to ecosystem growth. While India has 53 quantum-related startups (compared to China's 63), only 2.63 per cent of domestic quantum research receives industry funding, while 16.8 per cent remains entirely devoid of funding. This reflects deep structural gaps in talent, investment, and secure access to upstream supply chains. Current collaborative efforts are limited where the partnership between Infosys and QuintessenceLabs in quantum cybersecurity integrates the hybrid quantum encryption into the enterprise solutions of Infosys. While such partnerships are promising, they remain narrow in scope. What's needed is a structured, multilevel partnership, anchored in India's strategic interests. The Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor has advocated for a comprehensive ecosystem mapping, covering investments and supply chain dynamics, to identify collaboration opportunities and vulnerability points. While developing a requirement mapping, India should leverage the initiatives like the 'Quantum Entanglement Exchange', enabling Indian scholars to access advanced American quantum facilities, contributing diverse perspectives to research programmes. This exchange programme will also benefit the India-US TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilising Strategic Technology) initiative. Beyond bilateral cooperation, India should push for inclusion in industry-led international quantum standardisation bodies. As quantum communication and encryption systems proliferate, early engagement in setting interoperability norms will help India to quickly develop and deploy quantum technology applications. Startups must also be part of this multi-level collaboration. Cross-border startup ecosystems could address entrepreneurship gaps through structured collaboration. Initiatives like the India-United States Defence Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS X) could be undertaken to encourage the quantum innovation ecosystem. Such initiatives could also be trilateral between the US, India and South Korea, as a part of their trilateral technology dialogue. It would be beneficial if the premier incubation centres like the Telangana Hub (T-Hub) in India, the Seoul Startup Hub in South Korea, and the Convergence Accelerator in the US, come together offering joint funding and incubation programs to quantum startups. Overall, two contrasting approaches dominate quantum development. The first is the China model where its National Natural Science Foundation coordinates research across all quantum domains, outpacing the US's National Science Foundation by 2:1 in published studies. The other approach is that of the US, fostering entrepreneurial innovation through 300 quantum startups — nearly five times China's 63. India occupies a middle position with 53 quantum startups and $735 million allocated through the National Quantum Mission. This approach requires a push from the government and the industry. Since quantum technology development is still in the pre-market competition phase, India should actively engage with like-minded countries to secure its position within technology anchored geopolitics. The writer is JSW Science and Technology Fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), Delhi

How India can overcome the quantum lag behind U.S., China
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The Hindu

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How India can overcome the quantum lag behind U.S., China

As India embarks on its ambitious $750 million National Quantum Mission, it finds itself at a historic inflection point—much like the 1970s when it declared self-reliance in nuclear technology. Then, as now, the engine driving this leap is theoretical brilliance paired with mission execution. Today's mission, however, seeks mastery over a frontier even stranger than the atomic nucleus: the quantum realm. Useful parallel The universe, at its most fundamental level, operates under principles that defy classical intuition. A groundbreaking experiment conducted at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science in 1998, and reported in the prestigious journal Nature, vividly demonstrated one of quantum theory's most mind-bending assumptions: the act of observation influences reality. Researchers created a microscopic setup with a barrier containing two holes and directed electrons towards it. By employing an electronic detector as the observer, they meticulously tracked the electrons' behaviour. The experiment revealed that, when unobserved, electrons behaved as waves, simultaneously traversing both openings. However, upon observation by the detector, these same electrons were compelled to act as particles, passing through only one opening. Crucially, the degree of observation directly correlated with the extent of control over the resulting interference patterns validating fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics such as superposition, entanglement, and wavefunction collapse. These observations, amongst Richard Feynman's foundational work in the 1980s, would lay the foundation for Quantum Key Distribution computing, sensing and metrology, materials and devices, software and algorithms, optics, and photonics technologies. Around the same decade, India announced its self-reliance in nuclear technology that represented the culmination of decades of mathematical modelling, from Monte Carlo simulations for neutron transport to sophisticated algorithms for implosion dynamics. Starting in 1940s, under the leadership of Homi Bhabha, a theoretical physicist himself, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research-led mission successfully built capacity in neutron physics, reactor design calculations, and complex mathematical modelling. This helped physicists build Apsara, India's first research reactor, and later the entire nuclear power program possible. Both nuclear and quantum technology deal with the fundamental nature of matter at the atomic and subatomic levels and are built on the bedrock of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Quantum physics is the foundational framework describing matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic scales, encompassing all fundamental forces and particles like electrons and quarks. Nuclear physics, a specific branch within this framework, focuses intensely on the atomic nucleus—its protons and neutrons—and the powerful strong and weak nuclear forces that govern them, operating at much higher energy scales than typical atomic interactions. While quantum physics provides the universal rules for the microscopic world, nuclear physics applies these rules to unravel the complex behaviour and transformations within the nucleus itself, leading to phenomena like radioactivity, fission, and fusion. Quantum mechanics and nuclear physics depend greatly on mathematical structures such as linear algebra, differential equations and probability theory to model and predict the behaviour of subatomic particles, in which wave functions and probabilities are key concepts. This legacy of coupling theoretical brilliance with an almost obsessive focus on mission execution is profoundly relevant for India's quantum ambition today as it pursues its $750 million National Quantum Mission. Quantum computing demands exactly the skills India has cultivated: advanced linear algebra for quantum state manipulation, group theory for quantum symmetries, probability theory for quantum measurement, and number theory for quantum cryptography. The transition from nuclear to quantum represents an evolution in India's scientific journey. Where nuclear physics required mastery of differential equations and statistical mechanics, quantum computing demands tensor algebra and quantum field theory—domains where India's mathematical tradition provides natural advantages. The same institutions that powered nuclear success—TIFR, IITs, DRDO and BARC—now host quantum research centres and have built and tested India's first 6-qubit superconducting quantum processor, facilitating India's entry into the quantum hardware arena, a field dominated so far by only a few nations. Interestingly, all the major building blocks were conceived in India: the qubits were designed and made at TIFR's Mumbai facility, with a new ring-resonator design created by TIFR researchers. The control electronics and software stack were integrated by DRDO's Young Scientists Laboratory for Quantum Technologies (DYSL-QT) in Pune with assistance from TCS, showcasing a synergy among defence labs, academics, and industry. Companies like QPiAi and QNu Labs are actively developing quantum computing and quantum-safe communication while the government is pursuing secure satellite-based quantum key distribution and advanced metrology systems. The successful demonstration of free-space quantum secure communication over more than one kilometre by DRDO-Industry-Academia Centre of Excellence (DIA-CoE) at IIT Delhi further highlights India's progress in practical applications. Further , start-ups such as Nav Wireless are pioneering indigenous Free space optical communication (FSOC) technology that can support interference-free quantum communication in urban and low resource rural settings. Despite India's progress in software-centric, theoretical and algorithmic aspects of quantum computing, the country lags China and the U.S. China leads in quantum communications, lags in computing (where the United States excels), and matches the United States in sensing. China excels in market-ready tech, while the U.S. dominates other high-impact areas. These progresses have been made possible due to their success in attracting top talent, providing enabling infrastructure/labs and sufficient funding (China's $15 billion public quantum funding) The crucial talent gap While India has a very large number of quantum-educated graduates and ranks second globally in quantum-ready workforce with approximately 91,000 graduates as of 2021 (based on quantum-relevant fields such as biochemistry, electronics, chemical engineering, mathematics, and statistics published by McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor-April 2024), the human resource involved in developing quantum technologies is abysmally small. This critical shortage means entire subfields of quantum technology remain unexplored or underdeveloped within India. Furthermore, a notable weakness is the limited industry funding for research, with only 2.6% of surveyed PhD and postdoctoral researchers in India reporting industry support as per Office of PSA's April 2025- India's International Technology Engagement Strategy for Quantum Science, Technology and Innovationreport. This indicates a disconnect between the available academic talent and its effective integration into industrial quantum development. Building enabling infrastructure and self-reliance Recognising these gaps, the National Quantum Mission aims to significantly boost India's capabilities. Plans include expanding local fabrication facilities and supporting deep-tech startups through new funding initiatives, such as a recently announced $1.2 billion fund for deep-tech ventures. The structure of the mission consists of thematic hubs (T-Hubs) at world-class institutions such as IISc Bengaluru and Amravati Quantum Valley (Quantum Computing), IIT Madras (for Quantum Communication), IIT Bombay (for Quantum Sensing and Metrology), and IIT Delhi (for Quantum Materials & Devices) for creating research and skill-building in different quantum verticals. Further, India should also invest in the development of a robust domestic supply chain and talent base fabrication, cryogenics, and photonics on lines of the microelectronics commons programme in the US. While the Amravati Quantum declaration is a good start, India needs an accelerated roll-out of the enabling infrastructure to play catch-up with developed economies that have been investing 10X on Quantum initiatives. Fixing India's quantum talent woes The fragmented nature of India's research landscape, with few institutions appearing in top global rankings, could further hinder its ability to attract and retain top-tier foreign talent and lose Indian early-career researchers who often move to the U.S. and Europe for high-impact research opportunities. To reverse this trend, India should attract Indian-origin researchers working in international locations to contribute to its mission by offering innovative Visas (Europe's 'Talent Visas'), competitive salaries, better funding, and an enabling research environment. While a concerted effort is being made to create a qualified quantum workforce through numerous academic programs and collaborative research efforts, such as new undergraduate programs launched by the Department of Science & Technology (DST) and AICTE and efforts from not-for-profit organizations such as QIndia, the nation should focus on integrating quantum curriculum into K-12 education itself much on the lines of USA's National Q-12 education partnership. India's intellectual heritage, which enabled India's remarkable nuclear achievements, can now propel the nation toward quantum supremacy provided India focuses on Quantum communication and Computing as core areas as they are the foundational technology layers for enabling other critical missions on Healthcare, Energy and Defence. Sustained investment in specialized training, fostering stronger industry-academia collaboration, attracting and retaining top-tier talent, and developing a resilient domestic supply chain are all vital components for India to achieve its vision of becoming a global leader in the quantum revolution. (The author is an Emerging Technology expert with experience in setting up DeepTech public private partnerships and policy advisory in areas of AI, IoT, Quantum,5G, Geospatial, Autonomous and Data Centre Technologies.)

Chandrababu to tour Kuppam for two days to promote development and governance
Chandrababu to tour Kuppam for two days to promote development and governance

Hans India

time10 hours ago

  • Hans India

Chandrababu to tour Kuppam for two days to promote development and governance

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu is set to visit his Kuppam constituency for a two-day programme aimed at promoting development initiatives and engaging with local residents. His visit will kick off today, with the finalised schedule detailing a series of events and activities. The Chief Minister is expected to arrive at the helipad in Tumsi, Shantipuram mandal at 12:30 PM today. Following his arrival, he will attend a public meeting at the premises of the AP Model School in Tumsi at 12:50 PM, where he is likely to address local issues and initiatives. Later, CM Naidu will oversee the signing of Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with various industry owners, as well as explore stalls set up by different government departments showcasing progress and offerings. At 4:30 PM, he will visit Thimmarajupalli in Shantipuram mandal, where he will embark on a door-to-door campaign to understand public grievances and convey information about government schemes and developments. He is scheduled to return to his residence in Kuppam at approximately 7:05 PM for the night. The following day, Thursday, CM Naidu will commence his activities at the Kuppam Area Hospital, inaugurating the Tata Digital Nerve Centre at 10:30 AM. He will then conduct official reviews at his residence around 12:15 PM and is expected to leave the helipad at Tummisi by 4:10 PM, returning to Bengaluru later in the day. Additionally, the state government has announced the launch of the "First Step" programme, aimed at enhancing good governance across Andhra Pradesh, commencing today. Over the course of a month, leaders will visit households to inform citizens about government initiatives and progress, reinforcing the achievements of the past year and outlining future plans. CM Naidu has instructed leaders at all levels, from the state to village levels, to engage actively in this programme, particularly to counter misinformation campaigns from opposing parties.

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