2023 India Delegation

For the past decade, successive Australian governments and diplomats have been attempting to court India, seeking closer bilateral relationships with a free trade agreement seemingly unobtainable against the backdrop of dominant domestic politics for India’s part.

Due to hard work and the recent alignment of common geostrategic interests, it is significant that Australia has managed to secure a favoured relationship with India that most other countries do not have. For example, Australia is only one of three countries with who India has an annual leader’s summit.

The Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA), which entered into force on 29 December 2022, will deepen our economic ties and provide further opportunities for Australian and Indian businesses. Defence relationships are closer than they have ever been, with the India-Australia Joint Working Group on Defence Industry, Research and Materiel recently established alongside the Joint Working Group on ICT.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this year announced Indian skills recognition and fortified skilled migration pathways, including tech jobs only available to Indian citizens.

Finally, the Quad security dialogue brings traditional allies together with India to meet common strategic needs in the region and a core pillar of the Quad, as with the AUKUS trilateral agreement, focuses on critical technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum technology.

Recent visits by Australian and Indian Prime Ministers to India and Australia give expression to Australia’s newfound relationship between India – the major power in the Indo-Pacific, the world’s fifth-largest economy and the largest democracy on the planet.

It is well known that India is a technology superpower, with digital transformation and up-skilling core to the economic and social transformation that has been driven over the past decade. With a workforce of over 500 million, including a tech workforce numbering 5.4 million – a figure equivalent to the population of Greater Sydney – India is powering innovation in multiple digital technologies, and is home to the third-largest start-up ecosystem in the world.

This landscape creates fertile opportunities for Australian tech companies – including in investment, research, partnering and exports. With the deepening economic and defence ties between Australian and Indian governments, trade opportunities will grow for Australian companies, which up to now have looked east to America for export growth. Equally, they should now consider looking west.

The Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) in early June led a delegation of senior Australian government and industry executives to India who met with global Indian, Australian and US tech companies with significant presence in Bangalore and Delhi. Already, for large Australian banks, telecommunications and US tech companies, the majority of their global software engineering and development is carried out in India. Australian companies alone have invested over $100 million into Indian operations and capability, with Telstra’s 2,500 Indian staff doing R&D and engineering as well as handset and 5G testing. For other US companies delegates visited, their Indian workforces were upwards of 90,000 and for the India tech companies who hosted us having the largest workforces, with Infosys’ employees numbering over 340,000. From augmentation to innovation

What shone through in each company and government agency we visited was that India has some of the most highly skilled and trained people in the world. India grew and developed a reputation initially for labour augmentation and business process outsourcing, but it is now the prime place in the world to innovate and do so at scale.

India is producing a staggering 2.14 million STEM graduates each year. By contrast, in Australia, we have 55,000 tech graduates, which is well below demand.

There are 9,000 tech start-ups in India, of which over 1,900 are AI start-ups.

Each of the seven companies delegates visited reported the same single reason for operating in India: the talent of the people and the culture of ongoing learning and training, which serves as an embedded mindset. Nowhere else on the planet can you tap into such a highly skilled and trained tech workforce at such scale. It is now the quality, not the price, of the skills that is driving the shift. India’s skilled workforce has moved from a means of augmentation to genuine innovation.

The AIIA visited the following companies in India in June across Bangalore and Delhi:  IBM, Infosys, Telstra Kyndryl, Nasscom AI-IoT CoE, HCL Tech, Adobe, Digital India and the Australian High Commission.

Simon Bush, CEO, AIIA