However, But India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba...
Flipkart last week announced a Designed and engineered in India Smartphone [1].
And this was done by a homegrown company smartron.com. Their website shows how heavily invested they are in IoT (apart from mobile phones). This company was founded by a Mahesh Lingareddy, who it seems was a co-founder for a company which was acquired by Intel for $250 million.[2] - so he has all the resources (or credibility to raise funds) to put in place the execution plan for their vision of "India’s first global brand with focus on innovation, design, engineering, products and platforms." [3]
Or in other words, things are changing - past is not an indication for future failures.
[1] www.flipkart.com/billion-smartphone-launch-store
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/technologyinvesting/2-acqu...
[3] http://www.smartron.com/about.html
More about Smartron: www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/smartron-plans-rs-1500cr-investment-to-expand-operations/article9622268.ece
> Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone).
That was true maybe 10/20 years ago. Right now, thanks to Trump and Republicans, the US is much less attractive destination, especially for top-tier researchers. NSF funding rates are in the single digit percentage range, every year seems to see a new assault from state-level republicans on state university systems. Rising xenophobia and white nationalism obviously don't help the cause.
The situation in India is way better. There is more money available for research: the Shakti project is one example but many other big centers are being funded in various "institutes of national importance." There is a bi-partisan commitment to increasing funding and hiring for Indian research and there is a growing talent pool emerging from the non-IIT undergraduate colleges.
Twenty years ago, every R1 university in the US was better than every university in India. Now, once you get past the top-10 or 15, beyond the Berkeleys, MITs, Princetons and maybe Purdues, it's not at all clear that it is a good idea for a young assistant professor to go to say Virgina Tech over IISc or IIT Bombay. And in fact, these Indian institutes are consistently hiring people who would have been a shoo-in for a faculty position at places like VT.
umm, probably because both of these companies are not exactly known for their cutting edge r&d.
I'm not aware of anything of note coming from Baidu research. All they've done is a splashy celebrity hire of Andrew Ng, which is the exact opposite of how one would set up a serious research organization.
The US is still extremely attractive, especially for STEM talent.Indian educated migrants think of Trump as a temporary phase; and given how migrants power the American tech industry, they feel impervious to most Trump related threats.
Trump is by no means a temporary phase. The demographic trends that led to Trump will continue for a long while.
The "big sort" means that 70% of US population will be represented by 30 senators by 2050. Guess which party the other 70 senators representing primarily rural populations will belong to? The republican advantage in the electoral college will continue to grow as the rust belt becomes older and whiter. The supposed democratic flips of Arizona, Georgia and Texas due to rising Latino population are still far away in future and in the meantime, republican voter id legislation and gerrymandering of state-level districts to control state-level legislatures will ensure they remain red for the foreseeable future.
What all this really means is that the current situation -- where winning the primary is far more important than the general for republican politicians -- will continue for at least a decade or two more. Which means we WILL have more Trumps. The scary part of this is that the next guy won't be as incompetent at implementing his own agenda as this one.
I don't have any objections to a country looking out for its own interest, resisting illegal immigration or immigrants that otherwise cannot contribute much to the economy, but they are not the only ones the government is cracking down on.
your welfare state is not the world model
e.g.
Germany Sees Welfare Benefit Costs More Than Double
Asylum seekers received nearly $5.91 billion in welfare benefits in 2015
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-welfare-bill-rises-169...
and your assessment of employment rates among legal immigrants in Europe is simply not borne out by the statistics
https://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21709511-to...
I'm responding to
> the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide
The costs of the refugee crisis
The German government will have to spend 50 billion euros on refugees during this year and next, a new study estimates. In order to balance these costs, researchers urge financial restraint elsewhere.
http://www.dw.com/en/the-costs-of-the-refugee-crisis/a-19016...
Water on the Moon
Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone).
I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).