Author Archives: Dr. Samir Saran
Swords and Shields: Navigating the Modern Intelligence Landscape
SAMIR SARAN | ARCHISHMAN RAY GOSWAMI
As key custodians of a nation’s strategic intent, national intelligence services must account for and adapt to the wider socio-cultural and political factors shaping their operational environment. Today, shifting geopolitical tides in the form of accelerated multipolarity, scientific progress, and the erosion of accountability in global technological governance have converged to reshape national intelligence strategies. This paper seeks to make sense of these changes by discussing key features of the shifting global intelligence landscape. These include factors such as the role of ‘geotechnography’ in blurring distinctions between offline and online experiences, the consequences of growing inter-state competition over rare-earth elements and supply chains, the evolving character of human intelligence (HUMINT) amid ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS), and the role of private sector intelligence and Big Tech in a data-infused geostrategic terrain. The aim is to foster a discussion on how nations think about and use intelligence in changing times. It closes with an exploration of the implications of these changes for India’s national security.
Originally appeared here
Issue Brief : The Green Development Compact: Atlantic Ambition, Southern Scale
Amitabh Kant | Samir Saran
The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) have shifted beyond market-led climate action toward state-backed green industrial policy, driven by competitiveness, economic security, and technological leadership concerns. Despite differences in approach, Atlantic strategies share an inward focus that positions the Global South primarily as a consumer market or supplier of intermediate inputs. Such models are politically unsustainable for developing economies and economically inefficient for achieving the scale required for the global energy transition. This brief argues for moving from competition-driven industrial policy toward co-development and shared prosperity across regions. It proposes a Green Development Compact that integrates Northern capital, innovation, and corporate capacity with Southern scale, speed, and renewable endowments. It outlines practical instruments to operationalise this framework, including long-term offtake guarantees, shared innovation commons, and financial mechanisms that reduce risk for Southern projects.
Read more here.
Source: ORF Website, January 3, 2026
Growth story powered by indigenous engines
In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. In the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus
The year 2025 might well go down in Indian economic history alongside 1991 as a year that marks a decisive break with the past. These were both years that accelerated our intent, ambition, and execution as a nation. But, if in 1991, the initial burst of economic reform was driven by recognition of a balance of payments crisis, the 2025 reforms have been driven by understanding a balance of power opportunity. And this burst of reform, even more than those before, reflects how India’s leadership at the highest level — particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself — understands the way that growth is nurtured in this evolving, fragmented world.
By creating a political and geo-economic challenge, Donald Trump invited the Modi of the past to reappear: The political and economic revolutionary who thrives by confronting stale orthodoxy and refuses to outsource national destiny. By revealing international relationships as nakedly transactional, the US president reminded New Delhi of one basic truth: Nobody is going to celebrate India’s rise. In a progress-starved global economy, growth is not shared. Instead, growth is competed for, hoarded, weaponised. We might have been lulled into thinking, for a time, that growth would emerge from partnerships. But Modi has correctly identified that growth is DIY: We must do it for ourselves — and keep doing it. It must be incubated, nourished, and sustained domestically, like a household plant that needs constant watering, or a steel plant that can never be shut down. Global relationships matter, but the West is neither enemy nor saviour. It is simply a partner whose errant ways must be moderated through calm engagement.
In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. But, in the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus, through example rather than exhortation. This is what it means to be Bharat. Growth is the greatest, best example we can set for the world. And that is what Modi has given us in this year of reform on steroids: The building blocks of decades of growth.
Perhaps, the most consequential of these is the pushing through of the four labour codes. This is the biggest factor-market structural reset since the 1990s. Today’s India has finally understood the support businesses need to help us become a developed nation. Rules have been cut by three-quarters, reporting forms by 60%, and registers for returns by 90%. More than 60 million enterprises will benefit — five times the footprint even of GST.
But GST itself has been reshaped: Two slabs eliminated, compliance simplified. Lower tax enabled quarters of euphoric growth — but, even more importantly, the fatigue felt by small businesses was addressed. Reform is not just a one-off event, an initial investment; it requires maintenance, continual recalibration in response to lived reality, and attentive leadership.
Tax cuts are, in fact, stimulus by stealth. When Union Budget 2025 raised the cut-off for income tax exemption to ₹1,00,000 a month, Modi showed that the creation of an Indian middle class requires its protection from government — not just from extortionary taxes but from unnecessary harassment and criminalisation. The Unified Securities Market Code, the Jan Vishwas 2.0 Bill, and the new Income Tax Act show that clarity rather than coercion is the cornerstone of India’s emerging State.
Finally, in December, three reforms signal the strategic confidence that Bharat now has. In the past, a divided polity twisted itself into knots about foreign participation in sectors such as insurance and nuclear energy. Those days are gone. Without fuss or fanfare, nuclear power and insurance were opened to private participation, their legal framework modernised and brought into line with global norms, and our clean energy ambitions restated.
Each of these reforms is individually significant. Taken together, they are revolutionary. Modi is doing nationally what he once did in Gujarat, what he did later with Digital India and the GST — taking big bets and forcing an ossified state machinery into movement through sheer willpower. No longer will anyone pretend that external benevolence can carry India forward. The engines and energy that propel us will be indigenous.
Throughout 2025, unforeseen challenges arose abroad. But Modi’s response was domestic energy, domestic focus, domestic reform. Before restructuring its partnership with the world, India must rewrite its contract with itself. This is the time to write India’s future, and Indians will do it.
Source: Originally appeared in Hindustan Times
Beyond Chips, Data Centres Lies India’s Ai Opportunity
As the world leaves the Compute Era and enters the Diffusion Era, India – its companies, its institutions and governments – must ask three questions
The world is competing over AI. But this will not remain merely a race towards a smaller chip, a larger data centre, or a faster model. The winner will be determined by those who turn innovation into impact and convert technological advances into product value, institutional capacity and community trust. Power in this era will flow not only to those who own algorithms or command fields of silicon, but also to those who find ways to weave AI into daily life at the national or continental scale.
Three distinct processes and evolutions compose this AI age. The first is the Compute Era, in which chip supply chains and hyperscale data centres determine market share. It tilts towards those with capital, energy and traditional resources such as land and water. The second is the Diffusion Era, where nations with population-scale digital platforms and deep real-economy deployment shape how and where value is created, captured, and compounded. The third is the Governance Era, in which sovereign power and political legitimacy — as well as geopolitical leverage — pick winners among AI systems.
As talk of overinvestment in data centres and supporting facilities grows, we may see the peaking of the Compute Era. Computational resources will become a utility — invested in like legacy utilities, priced like them, and regulated like them. Such a path has been followed many times: The introduction of a new technology, a boom period of sensation and overinvestment, followed by an overhang in which the physical, corporate and human-capital remnants of the boom are transformed into core infrastructure for broader innovation and growth.
What you do with compute infrastructure is what will create value in the Diffusion Era. Nations like India — experienced at adopting and adapting technology at scale — will have a natural advantage. The benefits of compute as a utility will flow to those who can build applications that create value for the greatest number. Trust will be the key. Success will depend upon how effectively kinship and trust can be nurtured, and how much value a community sees in a product. LLMs will have to localise. Large models are trained on the Common Crawl, which over-represents Western data and misrepresents the cultural context of countries like India. The Diffusion Era will seek to correct that. New winners will emerge from within communities. Beyond the horizon lies the Governance Era. Governments will respond to the Diffusion Era by guarding data sovereignty more zealously than they have hitherto. They will seek to control the utilities left over from the Compute Era, and intervene in the competitive dynamics of the Diffusion Era. Such a return to sovereign power is almost inevitable for a boom-bust-diffusion technology.
As the world leaves the Compute Era and enters the Diffusion Era, India — its companies, its institutions and governments — must ask three questions.
First, can Indian companies take the necessary risks? Do they have the capability to bet on an unknown future? Smaller enterprises have demonstrated they have the entrepreneurial nous to do so. But will the broader private sector be able to seize the benefits of the Diffusion Era? It will require a change in mindset, in corporate governance, and risk appetite.
Second, can Indian institutions and finance find, energise and incentivise capital to create systems that can bet on unknowns and undiscovered innovations? Can we ensure that patient capital emerges from India and the world that can support and develop infrastructure at a utility scale?
And can the government create a world-beating regulatory structure that blends private profit and public good — like, for example, the Digital Public Infrastructure model? Can it protect individual rights and digital sovereignty without stifling entrepreneurial fever? Can we build an India-specific AI architecture that sits comfortably within and atop a global AI system?
If India can answer these three questions, it will dominate the threefold era of AI. Let’s build compute infrastructure, unleash entrepreneurial communities, and create supportive regulation.
Source: Originally Appeared in Indian Express
Samir Saran 