When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the launch of the World Health Organization’s mYoga app on International Yoga Day in 2021, he lauded the initiative’s exemplary “fusion of modern technology and ancient science.” The statement reflects a critical undercurrent of India’s approach to technology under Modi – over the past five years, the Indian government has made a concerted effort to reconcile its technological ambitions with its civilizational preoccupations.
Most international observers understandably focus on the strategic and economic motivations driving India’s push for global leadership in technology, particularly as supply chains and emerging technologies grow ever more critical. However, failure to reckon with the ideational thrust of India’s tech policy results in an incomplete picture. India seeks to leverage technology to preserve, promote, and proliferate its civilizational culture, a strategy that shapes everything from domestic innovation pathways to multilateral engagement through international forums.
Fusing Heritage and Technology
The central government has given institutional form to this vision through the Science and Heritage Research Initiative (SHRI) under the Department of Science and Technology. At the five-year anniversary celebration of SHRI in December, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh reiterated “the government’s commitment to synergizing traditional knowledge with cutting-edge technologies.” The senior bureaucrat credited Modi for personally championing this fusion, drawing attention to “the transformative potential of blending India’s ancient wisdom with contemporary scientific innovations.”
The Indian government has realized this potential across a number of domains, including tangible or built heritage. The Indian Heritage in Digital Space (IHDS) initiative exemplifies these ongoing efforts, harnessing “emerging technologies” in service of “India’s rich history.” For example, in 2024, the central government funded a Center of Excellence for IHDS at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, with the goal of producing “immersive digital visualizations” of the prominent heritage sites at Ajanta, Ellora, and Dwarka.
This project underscores an expansive vision of the combined power of technology and culture – moving “beyond simply storing” heritage data to “creating vivid experiences” of India’s “vast treasure” for domestic and global audiences. Such initiatives also dovetail with New Delhi’s broader approach to physical heritage and civilizational soft power, what researchers have recently called “heritage diplomacy.”
Shaping the Global Knowledge Economy
Crucially, the Indian government’s efforts to blend technology and civilizational culture extend past the built world of monuments and archeological sites. At the December celebration, Singh also argued that “aligning heritage with innovation” could position India as a “leader in the global knowledge economy,” signaling the intellectual concerns animating India’s civilizational tech policy. This framing resonates with broader shifts in India’s foreign policy vision – Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has clearly articulated rising India’s desire to shape global norms and discourses.
In line with these aims, the central government has funded a number of technological initiatives aimed at preserving and promoting Indian cultural knowledge. For instance, the SHRI scheme supported the establishment of KoshaSHRI, a digitized encyclopedic historical dictionary of Sanskrit hosted by the Deccan College in Pune. In service of the project, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing – the research and development arm of the Ministry of Electronics and Technology – developed a range of technologies including search, editing, design, recognition, and conversion tools.
The Indian government has also targeted “India’s rich textual traditions” for digitization and dissemination under the new Gyan Bharatam Mission, which will invest $53 million over the next seven years to preserve and promote Indian manuscripts.
Moreover, India has remained attentive to the intersection between the knowledge economy and emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). The Indian government’s flagship AI initiative – the AI4Bharat research lab at IIT Madras – “is dedicated to advancing AI technology for Indian languages.” Similarly, the public Digital India Corporation’s Bhashini division harnesses AI and natural language processing to power translations across 22 Indian languages. Launched in 2022, their platform now provides 300 million translations per month and even provided multilingual communications at the historic Maha Kumbh festival earlier this year, which saw 663 million visitors over 45 days.
Apart from securing access to these technologies for the diverse Indian public, like through linguistic crowd-sourcing efforts, these initiatives seek to ensure that Indian cultural knowledge shapes artificial intelligence. India is pushing for digital futures intellectually tethered to Indian civilization – not dominated by the West.
Tech for Traditional Medicine
The emphasis on fusing heritage and tech also spills over into India’s global engagement, particularly in the health space. In fact, the flashy launch of international- and domestic-facing yoga apps belies a much wider campaign to position India as a world leader in the application of digital innovations for traditional medicine.
Many of these efforts have played out through the World Health Organization. For instance, in 2022, the Indian government provided “foundational support” for the establishment of the Global Traditional Medicine Center, even approving the physical placement of the organization in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The WHO identified “innovation and technology” as one of the key focus areas for the institution, and the Indian Cabinet singled out “artificial intelligence-based solutions” for special attention.
In the time since, the Indian government has continued to drive multilateral agendas toward emerging technologies for traditional medicine, providing financial support for the creation of a WHO technical brief on AI applications for traditional medicine in 2025.
In the domestic sphere, India has doubled down on existing traditional health tech initiatives while also spearheading new research projects. In one example, the central government has transformed the function of the Traditional Digital Knowledge Library, a program launched in 2001 to digitally document information related to traditional Indian wellness systems, by dramatically expanding access to the repository in 2022.
In another fascinating case, the Indian government is funding the development of a new biomedical sub-field known as Ayurgenomics, which employs the tools of modern genomics to identify the scientific basis of Ayurvedic classifications – essentially harnessing technological innovations to validate Indian civilizational wellness frameworks long dismissed by Western medical science.
Technology for a Civilizational State
The Modi government’s push to blend civilizational culture with cutting-edge technology is emblematic of a central tension in the narrative of rising India. As Jaishankar himself put it, India’s “ascendance on the ladder of power” is also the “transformation of a civilizational society into a modern nation-state.” The ideational dimension of India’s tech policy aims to square that circle, reconciling aspirations of global leadership in the modern era with fierce convictions about the enduring importance of civilizational heritage.
As India navigates its rise in the international system, these cultural-civilizational concerns are here to stay. In combination with strategic and economic considerations, they will continue to drive India’s tech policy in the decades to come.