Transcript: Gautam Adani’s Speech on India’s Growth, ‘Atmanirbharata’, Technology at IIT-KGP

The world is moving from conventional war to technology-driven wars of power, and our ability to prepare will decide our future. Because the wars that we have to fight today are often invisible. They are fought in our server farms and not in trenches. The weapons are algorithms, not guns.

The empires are not built on land. They are built in data centers. The armies are botnets and not battalions. And here is the uncomfortable truth:

In terms of technology dependence, 90% of our semiconductors are imported. One disruption or sanction can freeze our digital economy.

In the case of energy vulnerability, we import 85% of our oil. A single geopolitical incident can restrict our growth.

Whenever data crosses India’s borders, every bit of this data becomes raw material for foreign algorithms, creates foreign wealth and strengthens foreign dominance.

And in the case of military dependence, many of our critical systems are imported, bringing our national security to the political will and supply chains of other nations.

This is the freedom we must now fight for – the freedom of self-reliance, the freedom of Atmanirbharata if we are to be truly free.

# The Next Generation of Freedom Fighters

Eighty years ago, here in the Hijli jail, young men and women fought for the right to govern our land. That same fight continues, only the weapons have changed. And this is what I want every student here to take back: You are the next generation of freedom fighters. Your innovations, your software code, and your ideas are today’s weapons. You will decide whether India takes command of its destiny or surrenders it to others.

The Age of Transformation

My dear friends, I have been an entrepreneur since the age of sixteen. I have navigated multiple cycles of disruptions, many moments of transformations and built businesses through both crisis and opportunity. But I can tell you with absolute conviction that the age of transformations now unfolding before us is unlike anything I have seen.

And the battlefield is not just about protecting our nation’s borders. It is about securing our technology leadership and ensuring we are able to stay at the forefront of global innovations.

It is about redesigning every business, reimagining every industry, and rewriting every rule of the game so we lead and not just participate as low-cost players in the global race. Because as we all know, in a world of robotics and AI, cost advantages will vanish overnight and we can quickly lose our ability to compete.

# The Speed of Change

This is not a transformation at 1x speed, it is 10x, it is 100x and it is accelerating towards 1000x as AI starts to build AI, LLMs start to write LLMs, robots start to build robots, code starts to write code, machines start to teach machines and discoveries start to fuel more discoveries. And this is why I call it our second freedom struggle.

The world has never seen industrial and intelligence revolutions of this scale. Here is what I can tell you: tomorrow’s trillion-dollar value disruptors will bend others to their will and some of them will go on to dominate the world like no company has ever done before.

Companies will become more powerful than many nations. And over the next decade, several companies that today seem unbeatable will vanish. They will disappear not because they lack resources but because they could simply not compete at the pace and scale needed.

Transforming Education

And I will say that same stands true for educational institutions because the educational institutions too must transform. They must move at the speed of change, drive cutting-edge research and yet be accountable to real-world impact.

This is no longer about producing brilliant graduates. It is about producing brilliant patriots that graduate armed with ideas, discipline, and the will to make India unshakable.

The brutal truth is when knowledge is a commodity, when skills can be downloaded and when AI can crack engineering problems in seconds, we must ask: what is the future value of an engineering or technical degree? How should we prepare?

Because the lifespan of our technical knowledge has collapsed from years to months, maybe even weeks. This means the gap between academic theory and industry reality is widening faster than ever before.

# The New Currency

And the new currency is abundance – abundance of bold ideas, abundance of lightning-speed adaptations, abundance of relentless reinventions. In this new round of battle, it is the most brilliant minds that India will need. And you, my dear professors, are the custodians of these minds.

Minds trained on this very ground, trained to think beyond the textbook, trained for rapid inventions and trained to carry the courage of discovery as a national duty.

While this is not a call to give up the heritage of our top institutions, it is indeed a call for designing a different future before it is too late.

Corporate Responsibility

Let me now talk about Indian corporates and it begins with the honest admission that we in industry must share equal responsibility for the innovation deficit India faces. After all, we hire from these colleges and the best among them are government-funded. We stand on the shoulders of public institutions like ISRO, BARC, DRDO, ICMR, NCL and many more. These have given us the inventions, breakthroughs and discoveries that form our launchpads.

From ISRO’s Chandrayaan to Aadhaar, from UPI to vaccine research, from freight corridors to our renewable grids, it is worth reflecting that it is the government that has built the foundation of our modern economy. And this model will not adequately sustain in the race we are entering.

If India is to lead in the age of transformative technologies like advanced materials, biotechnology, deep tech and many others, we must carry our share of the nation’s innovation burden – translated not into marketing slogans but into budget allocations, world-class laboratories and risk capital.

We must provide platforms where young minds can explore and even fail without fear. If the corporates do not step up, we will remain users of foreign breakthroughs and never be the originators. This is the future that we cannot accept.

The Path Forward

So what is a possible path forward? If speed and scale are the defining challenges of our academic institutions, then the answer lies in blurring the lines between where education ends and where enterprise begins.

In the industrial era, institutions and corporates operated in parallel lanes. Academia produced graduates, industry consumed them. In the world we have now entered, victory will most often belong to the owners of IP and nations will weaponize this IP, with governments controlling the IP distributions.

Therefore, we must master partnerships that unite diverse stakeholders, enable seamless talent flow between labs and industry and embed IP sharing and funding models that reward both groundbreaking research and rapid commercializations.

# Learning from Global Examples

And there are many examples to learn from. In Silicon Valley, Stanford’s deep ties with venture capital and industry have seeded tech companies from Google to Tesla, with startups and academia feeding each other’s growth.

In the case of biotech synergy, the Boston-Cambridge cluster saw Moderna and its vaccines emerge directly from MIT and Harvard labs, which was then accelerated by corporate funding.

Therefore, universities must push the boundaries of research and corporates must push the boundaries of executions. Universities must focus on breakthroughs and corporates must focus on scaling the breakthroughs. And together we must create impact not just in the markets but in the very fabric of our Indian society.

Proposed Initiatives

And so let me propose some ideas. Together we will create living laboratories here at IIT Kharagpur across high-impact sectors that reflect the very challenges India must lead in:

# Renewable Energy

By 2030, India aims to lead the world in renewables. At Adani, we are building the world’s largest renewable energy park in Khavda in the Kutch district of Gujarat – 30 gigawatts of capacity across 500 square kilometers. Imagine IIT KGP students co-developing AI-driven grid balancing solutions, real-time predictive maintenance and sector-wide optimization tools.

# Ports and Logistics

Adani Ports moves over 400 million tons of cargo annually. As the world’s most integrated logistics player, even a single day delay can ripple through supply chains. IIT KGP talent can design machine learning-based berth scheduling, autonomous container handling and real-time logistics optimization systems.

# Airports and Smart Mobility

Adani airports handle 100 million passengers a year across seven of India’s busiest hubs. This complex ecosystem spans transport, security, energy and passenger experience. IIT KGP engineers could pioneer real-time crowd predictions, intelligent baggage handling and IoT-enabled operations to set new benchmarks.

# The Adani IIT Platinum Jubilee Changemakers Fellowship

Building on these initiatives, we are launching the annual Adani IIT Platinum Jubilee Changemakers Fellowship, coordinated by IIT Kharagpur and covering every IIT. Its mission is to channel the nation’s top talent into high-impact projects that advance national priorities.

This framework creates a playbook for any major corporate to partner effectively with top institutions. And together we can accelerate India’s sheer scale of talent into a force that in a decade can be parallel to Silicon Valley.

A Personal Journey

Now let me address the students in this audience, many of whom may be wondering, “Am I not too young to really make a difference?” And the best way I can answer is to tell you my own story, and hopefully, you will have a few takeaways.

My dear young friends, it was 1978, and as I walked onto the Ahmedabad railway platform awaiting the Gujarat Mail to take me to Mumbai, I held two tickets in my hands. In one hand was a second-class ticket bought after thirty minutes in a crowded station queue. In the other hand was my ticket to freedom.

At sixteen years of age, like many of you, I too stood at a crossing. One track led to the predictable safety of school, the other to the vast unknown of the city of Mumbai.

But in my heart, there was a single unshakable belief that the train I was about to board was not just taking me to Mumbai. It was giving me the freedom to make my own choices. The freedom to build my life with my own hands.

# Early Lessons

In Mumbai, my first job was sorting diamonds, and before long, I was trading in diamonds. That is where my real education began.

Trading teaches you that loss is not the enemy. Hesitation is. And I realized something deeper: only those who are truly free-minded make good traders because you learn to embrace risk, to make fast decisions and to be comfortable with incomplete information or losses you incur. The speed of decision-making was to become my first operating philosophy for life.

By the age of nineteen, I found myself back in Ahmedabad running my brother’s polymers factory. I realized how integrated manufacturing and supply chains were not just background operations but the core engines that decided who would dominate. It taught me the value of understanding and owning end-to-end integrated processes. This learning became the second operating philosophy that would guide every venture I would thereafter build.

# The Crisis of 1991

Then came the crisis of 1991. I was twenty-nine when India was forced to open its doors to liberalization. It was the start of a massive policy change. For me, with my willingness to take risk, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. I moved swiftly and stepped into polymer trading.

Fast forward and just three years later, we had overtaken everybody and built India’s largest trading house. We then took it public. That was the birth of Adani Enterprises. I turned thirty-two.

But success has its own way of revealing what you lack, and I realized that while I was a very good trader, I did not have an anchor. Without real assets in the real economy, I had no real foundations. One market crash and I could be swept away. That is when the third operating philosophy became clear to me: You cannot build your empire on ground you do not own.

# The Mundra Vision

And this took me to Mundra, that was to become my karma bhumi. When I first announced my intentions to build a port in Mundra, most people thought I had lost my mind – not just because I had never laid a single brick in my life, but because I chose to build the port within one of India’s largest marshlands.

I still recall that when I presented the idea, some of the bankers laughed and asked, “Mr. Adani, how do you expect us to finance land that is underwater?” And they were not wrong.

Mundra had no access, no industries, no precedent. And fast forward, in less than three decades, Mundra became a continental scale logistics engine moving an astonishing 250 billion metric tons of cargo every year.

Today, we run one of the world’s largest integrated logistics networks made up of our twenty-one national and international ports, rail networks, inland container depots, warehouses and fulfillment centers.

From Ports to Energy: Building India’s Power Infrastructure

Thereafter, from ports we moved into energy and starting in 2007 we built the world’s largest single location coal based private power plant of 4,200 MW and along with it we also built India’s first 1,000 kilometers high voltage DC transmission systems.

Then we took over Mumbai’s distribution network and followed it by building the world’s largest solar plant of that time – 770 MW – all in just nine months and we continued expanding.

Today in less than two decades our energy portfolio spans generation, transmission, distribution, LNG, LPG, city gas distribution, solar panel and wind turbines manufacturing, EV charging, batteries, hydrogen and we are building at Khavda the world’s largest hybrid renewable energy park over an area five times the size of Paris.

Conquering the Skies: India’s Aviation Revolution

Thereafter, from the gateways to the oceans and gateways to the deserts, we turned to the gateways of the skies of India. And six years ago we stepped into airport business.

Today we own the largest fleet of airports controlled by any single entity anywhere in the world. We move 100 million passengers annually managing 28% of India’s air passengers and we also manage 40% of India’s air cargo.

We are commissioning the Navi Mumbai airport later this year which when complete will handle another 90 million passengers and around each airport we are creating urban ecosystems where air travel will merge seamlessly with commerce, industries, retail, hospitality and residential living. No company has ever conceptualized such an integrated ecosystem at this scale.

The India Growth Story: Unstoppable Momentum

My young friends, I talk about Mundra, Khavda, our airports because they were born not just from my spirit of entrepreneurship, but also from my optimism that the India growth story is unstoppable.

I have learnt that any visionary private sector group can achieve scale only when it moves in steps with the policies of a visionary government. And over the past decade, this mutual belief – the government’s belief in India’s potential, and my belief in the government policies – gave us the runway to build at a pace that has made us India’s largest infrastructure company.

My dear students, the same is even more true for you. If you align your ambition with India’s rise, the peak of your careers will unfold alongside the peak of India’s power. By 2050, when you are in your prime, you will be part of a $25 trillion Indian economy shaping global debates, writing the rules, and setting the pace for the future.

No other nation offers its youth an opportunity of this scale. Therefore, I always say there has never been a better time to be in India.

Four Principles for a Greater Bharat

And so my dear friends, as I prepare to close, I leave you with four principles that I believe will define a greater Bharat in our time.

First, you are the new freedom fighters of Bharat. Eighty years ago, within the cold walls of the Hazaribagh Jail, young men and women your age fought for freedom. Today, your weapons are ideas. Your ammunition is innovation, and your fight is for a sovereign India that submits to none.

Second, build fast for Bharat. From the fisherman of Kutch to the farmer of Kharagpur, our responsibility is to Bharat first. If we do not build for 1.4 billion of our own, we surrender to foreign flags.

Third, fortify our foundations. Infrastructure, technology, intellectual property – these are the roots of our freedom. A nation standing on borrowed soil cannot hold its head high.

Fourth, march as one team for Bharat. Walking alone, speed is possible. Walking together, greatness is inevitable. When academia and industries fuse into one mission squad, India is unstoppable.

Your Choice: Salary or Legacy

And so my friends, remember, Chittaranjan Das at nineteen dropped in the Hazaribagh jail for seven years and yet he returned to fight again for your freedom and mine. Remember, if I could take a train to Mumbai at sixteen with nothing but belief, then you with your knowledge and heritage, can go much farther.

And remember, soon in your hands will be two tickets. One to a comfortable life – maybe a foreign company, a safe job. The other a ticket to stay, the drive to build for Bharat, to join this second freedom struggle.

One train takes you to a salary, the other takes you to a legacy. And you must decide which train you will take – salary or a legacy. Only one train carries the pride of building Bharat.

And therefore, I hope you stand tall and your journey begins with these words: “Go build so strong that no fear can chain us. Stand so tall that no empire can bend us. Rise so high that no force can stop us.”

Our Bharat awaits you. Vande Mataram. Jai Hind.

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