India, Nov. 7 -- Last weekend, this column argued why India must establish tech sovereignty. . There was despondency when pointing out that as things are in tech, India is a Tier II country as opposed to China and the US-now counted as Tier I countries. How did things get to be this way? Policy wonk Venky Hariharan (Venky) says fundamentally it's language.

Getting AI to generate a sentence in Malayalam or Tamil or any other regional language is dearer than generating one in English. He shared a sentence as an example: "People should benefit from AI, regardless of the language they speak." This appears in a paper by CLEAR, a coalition working on language equity in AI. It points out that "Each of these sentences convey the same meaning; th...