New Delhi: The country’s ambitious plan to build its first Quantum and AI University has hit a bottleneck: India has a massive shortage of qualified AI professors and researchers.
The planned university is to be set up at Amaravati in Andhra Pradesh at an estimated cost of $77 million.
The National Institute of Electronics & Information Technology (NIELIT), operating under the ministry of electronics & IT, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh government to establish the campus.
But even as the country pours millions into cutting-edge AI infrastructure, it faces a fundamental constraint: world-class facilities can be built relatively quickly, but the highly skilled faculty needed to teach, conduct research and train the next generation of AI talent cannot be created overnight.
Dr Pankaj Mittal, secretary general of Association of Indian Universities, told University World News: “India needs many more qualified AI faculty to support the scale and speed at which AI is expanding. India has a growing pool of capable faculty in computer science, data science, mathematics, statistics, machine learning and related disciplines, but the number of academicians with deep, specialised expertise in advanced AI is still limited.
According to the Stanford AI Index Report that tracks the global concentration of AI talent, India accounts for nearly 15% to 16% of the global AI workforce. But its contribution to high-quality AI research stands at only around 2%.
NITI Aayog’s AI roadmap last year identified talent retention as a major challenge because many top AI experts prefer working for high-paying technology companies or moving abroad rather than joining universities.
Consequently, premier institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) struggle to recruit and retain skilled faculty members, according to a former IIT Delhi Professor, V Ramgopal Rao.
A primary reason for this issue is the vast disparity in salaries. Technology companies and private research labs often offer AI professionals salaries substantially higher than those at public higher education institutions, which are bound by fixed government pay structures, Rao added.
NITI Aayog has also identified this pay gap as a factor pushing PhD graduates towards private-sector opportunities in India and abroad.
In addition, advanced AI research requires powerful computers, large GPU clusters, and high-quality datasets. Experts opined that while these resources are readily available in private companies, most Indian universities lack them.