> They should also invest more in research. Why does india have less supercomputers than sweden? Does this mean that india is doing less research in some aspects than a country of just 10 million people?

India is huge, but only about 100 million Indians were considered part of the global middle class before Covid and now it's apparently only about 70 million.

And the global middle class starts at about $3500 per year, which would probably mean starvation level in Sweden.

For people with comparable incomes, India is most likely "only" 3-4 Swedens, maybe even less. So maybe 40 million people.

Poor countries, people wise, are much smaller than they seem. I come from a poor country and you can definitely feel this.

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.

I just realized that another one of India's 11 entries on the Nobelist list is Amartya Sen, a professor at Harvard in the US, who I should have included with the 3 other US NRI Nobelists. He grew up in India and went to school there; moved to the UK in 01953; alternated between the UK, US, and India until 01971; between the UK and US from 01971 to 01987; and he's been at Harvard ever since. He won his economics Nobel 27 years after his last stint in India, in 01998.

I wonder if he would have been able to do the brilliant work he has done had he stayed in India. The shameful affair at Narendra University suggests otherwise.

> and two of them are Mother Teresa and Rudyard Kipling, who did not have to suffer from the Indian educational system

Asia's first Nobel Laureate, RN Tagore also did not suffer Indian (British colonial) education system. He was home-schooled.

Thank you for that correction! I wonder how many others on that list similarly escaped its clutches.

>> I think the problem with India is the people in charge

There is a subliminal sentiment in India - whatever it has achieved/achieves is despite the people in charge.

Not that it makes a huge difference to your argument, but most countries don't look good compared to Sweden. It's a country that hits well above its weight in science and technology. A bit like South Korea.

Agreed!

It's also a matter of priorities. India has(had) significant amounts of people living in pretty bad conditions ( like poor quality housing with no running water).

Which do you prioritise, lifting people out of poverty/squalid living conditions, research, industrial expansion, power projection (aircraft carriers so that India can protect it's interests, live up to it's potential, counter Chinese expansion), etc. ? There's a decent argument to be made that just encouraging and investing in industry and research will increase incomes and improve living conditions but it's unlikely to be sufficient.

China has managed to do both.

Are supercomputers practical, or a vanity project?

They very much are practical for all sorts of research, e.g. simulations of molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics, light scattering etc, all very relevant for medical research for instance. A lot of the research work I do wouldn't really be practical without access to supercomputers, yet the results feed back into pretty much every high-tech industry.

Supposedly that depends in part on whether you are a nuclear power.