India has a glorious history of scholarship unparallelled by any other country, but that ended centuries ago. In terms of scholarship, modern India isn't 3–4 Swedens. It's 0.2 Swedens.

As one very crude measure, the Swedish-language Wikipedia has 2.56 million articles. Urdu Wikipedia has 0.17 million articles, Hindi Wikipedia has 0.15 million articles, and the other Indian-language Wikipedias like Tamil are even less. The Hindi Wikipedia is half the size of Esperanto.

(Though this is an imperfect measure—the Cebuano Wikipedia is bigger than anything but English because of one extremely prolific guy.)

It may be a bit unfair to compare India to Sweden on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou..., since it's a Swedish prize, but as a second very crude measure, India has only 11 Nobel laureates, and two of them are Mother Teresa and Rudyard Kipling, who did not have to suffer from the Indian educational system. [Edit: and though the Poet was born in Kolkata, he was home-schooled.] Sweden has 32. Israel (9.5 million people, didn't exist until 01948) has 13. Poland, not noted for its wealth and prosperity since 01941, and with 4% of India's population, has 19.

— ⁂ —

So what's up? What's denying the billion Indians the opportunity to excel?

I don't think the problem is that 70 million people isn't enough to do research, or even that US$3500 per year isn't enough to build a semiconductor fab in your basement. It's not, but the Indian government presides over a US$3 trillion economy, nominal, which it has the power to tax. It spends US$36 billion a year on the military and the Union budget is US$490 billion a year overall. The US National Science Foundation's budget is US$8.3 billion a year, and the NIH is US$42 billion.

Caltech publishes more research than the entire country of India. Caltech spends US$4 billion a year, and though more than half of that is JPL, a lot of the rest goes to educating its undergraduate student body. Caltech is about 2400 students (most grad students), 300 professors, 40 Nobel Prizes (3½ times India), six Turing Award winners, and four Fields Medalists. It's two millionths the size of India, one twenty-thousandth the size of India's middle class, and 1% of the Union budget of the Indian government.

Neither population nor literate population nor material wealth is India's problem.

(To preemptively rebut the racist nonsense that someone will undoubtedly post, it's not genetics either—NRIs in the US number only 4.6 million, and only half that until 15 years ago, but have accrued three Nobel Prizes and a Fields Medal, and founded Sun, Robinhood, Spark Capital, and of course Khosla Ventures—and, apparently, 90 unicorns between 01997 and 02019: https://nitter.mint.lgbt/IlyaStrebulaev/status/1481662020659....)

I think the problem with India is the people in charge. They write cringe-inducing things like "DIR-V will see partnerships between Startups, Academia & Multinationals, to make India not only a RISC-V Talent Hub for the World but also supplier of RISC-V SoC (System on Chips) for Servers, Mobile devices, Automotive, IoT & Microcontrollers across the globe," or "RISC-V ... [is] pushing the Moore’s Law beyond its limits."

There are some extremely competent people at the IITs, including IIT Madras, which is how Shakti became such a decent implementation of RISC-V. But instead of being in charge of the sort of fools who think "mobile" and "startups" are proper nouns, that servers (as a hardware product category) are powered by SoCs, that Moore's Law is currently being pushed beyond its limits, or that CPU architectures are in any way relevant to whether semiconductor fabrication technology is developing faster or slower than Moore's Law predicts—those fools have somehow been put in charge of them.

How the hell are you going to have a government research strategy for making India a world power in semiconductor design when the people in charge of that research strategy evidently have the structure of the modern semiconductor industry all topsy-turvy in their minds? And it's not even because they don't have access to anybody who understands the issues—the Shakti design team, for one, is clearly pretty competent, and they're grappling with the limits of modern fabrication technology, and evidently Rajeev Chandrasekhar recognizes that. He himself got EE and CS degrees and worked at Intel on the 80486 design—30+ years ago. But evidently he doesn't consider it important to get their advice on whether Moore's Law is being "pushed beyond its limits" or not? Or, are they telling him the M1 Ultra is a RISC-V chip?

I don't have any idea how this kind of nonsense gets put out by a ministry headed by a former 80486 design engineer.