Tech is at the forefront of India’s foreign policy: EAM Jaishankar

When asked if the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2024 could change relations between the two countries, he argued that the relations have stabilised over the past five US Presidents from Clinton to Biden

With the Modi government's focus on areas like digital public infrastructure during its G20 presidency, cutting-edge manufacturing of semiconductors and driving innovation through a startup culture, technology has been at the forefront of India’s foreign policy and diplomacy, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on December 4.

"At the tail end of the second Modi government, we can see the centrality of tech to our approach towards governance and national security," Jaishankar said at the Global Technology Summit 2023 in Delhi.

"There are people, who believe it is not our 'karma' to do manufacturing. But you can't do cutting-edge research and development if you can't do manufacturing," he added.

The foreign minister also said that India is still playing catch up in many areas of tech as several governments in the previous three decades were not enough expansive or ambitious concerning technology.

Talking about globalisation, Jaishankar pointed out that the world realised how global production had become concentrated in one geography when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

"What had happened between the 90s and Covid was that for a wide variety of goods, we had become dependent on a single geography. Because the dependence was very basic, the rest of the world couldn't figure out how to get masks and ventilators and it hit home how the world has gone wrong," he said.

When asked if the outcome of the US Presidential election in 2024 could change relations between the two countries, he argued that the relations have stabilised over the past five US Presidents from Clinton to Biden.

"If a relationship can prosper with five very different presidents, I would suggest the data indicates a stability and enough structural soundness to this relationship," he said.