One of the key directives of the PSA’s office is to forecast the technology. While Ajay Kumar Sood agrees that the number of startups in the deep tech segment that are coming out in India is relatively low, he is seeing a quiet transformation.

According to PSA to the GoI Ajay Kumar Sood, India has to aim to become a “product nation”.

India is already very good at designing. Nearly 1/5^th of the world’s semiconductor design engineers are from India, but the country accounts for fewer than 10 percent of the global chip design facilities, and much of the designing is done for specifications offered by global companies.

Prof. Ajay stated, “We have a lot of designers. But what we need is that we should have designing capabilities (based) on our specifications, not on someone else’s specifications, which means some intellectual thinking has already (been done) somewhere else. We have to do it here. So that’s what will make our country a leading product nation.”

 

Prof. Ajay Kumar Sood is the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India (PSA to GoI) since April 2022.

 

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He is also the Chairperson of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology & Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC), a National Science Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, a member of the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council (PM-STIAC) from 2018 to March 2022 and from 2009 to 2014, he had also served as a Member of the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC) to the Prime Minister of India.

Prof. Ajay has a Doctorate in Physics from IISc Bangalore. His research interests include the Physics of Quantum materials, soft and active matter. He has published more than 450 papers in peer-reviewed journals and holds several patents.