India's Tech Build, 1940s–1970s

When India became independent in August 1947, it inherited a colonial economy designed for extraction, not production. Life expectancy was roughly 32 years. Literacy hovered around 12%. The country had almost no domestic capacity to produce steel, machinery, fertilizer, or scientific instruments at scale – nearly everything complex still had to be imported. Foreign exchange reserves were thin enough that even modest machinery bills strained the budget.

Over the next three decades, India undertook one of the most concentrated state-driven technology-building efforts of the 20th century. Organized through a series of Five‑Year Plans beginning in 1951, modeled loosely on Soviet central planning but adapted to a mixed economy, the push was guided heavily by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Dams and factories were, in his often‑quoted phrase, the “temples of modern India.”

Dams came first. The Bhakra Nangal Dam, construction of which began in 1948 and was substantially completed by 1963, rose to 226 meters, making it one of the tallest gravity dams in the world at the time. Its reservoir, the Gobind Sagar, could store roughly 9.34 billion cubic meters of water, irrigating large parts of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan while generating hydroelectric power through an installed capacity that eventually reached over 1,300 megawatts. Nehru personally visited the site multiple times during construction.

Alongside Bhakra Nangal, the Damodar Valley Corporation, established in 1948 and modeled explicitly on America’s Tennessee Valley Authority, built a system of multiple dams across the Damodar river basin in eastern India. The goal was to control catastrophic flooding that had historically devastated Bengal and Bihar while generating power for the region’s emerging steel and coal industries. Rural electrification followed a similarly steep curve: the number of villages connected to the electricity grid rose from only a few thousand at independence to well over 100,000 by the early 1970s. A majority of India’s roughly 500,000 villages still remained without power at that point.

Steel was the second pillar. Without domestic steel production, virtually nothing else – railways, machinery, construction, defense manufacturing – could scale independently. India built or substantially expanded several major integrated steel plants in this period. The Rourkela Steel Plant in Odisha was built with West German assistance and commissioned in 1959. The Bhilai Steel Plant in present‑day Chhattisgarh, built with Soviet assistance and commissioned the same year, eventually grew into one of the largest integrated steel plants in Asia. A third plant at Durgapur in West Bengal, built with British assistance, was also commissioned in 1959. India’s crude steel production, which stood at under 1.5 million tonnes annually around independence, climbed to over 6 million tonnes by the early 1970s, a roughly fourfold increase achieved largely through state‑owned enterprise at a time when India had almost no private capital base capable of financing projects at that scale.

Fertilizer production followed a parallel logic. The Sindri Fertilizer Factory in Bihar, commissioned in 1951 as independent India’s first large‑scale fertilizer plant, began producing ammonium sulphate domestically at a moment when nearly all chemical fertilizer used in Indian agriculture still had to be imported. That dependency would only become more urgent once the Green Revolution’s high‑yield crop varieties demanded far greater fertilizer inputs than traditional farming had ever required.

Scientific and engineering education needed to be built essentially from nothing. The first Indian Institute of Technology was established at Kharagpur in 1951, on the site of a former British detention camp, based on the recommendations of a government committee that had studied institutions like MIT. Four more IITs followed in relatively quick succession: Bombay in 1958 with Soviet assistance, Madras in 1959 with West German assistance, Kanpur in 1959 with American assistance through a consortium of nine US universities known as the Kanpur Indo‑American Programme, and Delhi, upgraded to IIT status in 1963. Each one was developed with support from a different foreign government or coalition, turning Cold War‑era competition for influence into an unusual accelerant for Indian technical education.

Alongside the IITs, a wider network of CSIR national laboratories – including the National Physical Laboratory, established in 1947, and the Central Drug Research Institute, established in 1951 – was built out across different Indian cities during this period. Each focused on a different applied research domain, from metrology to pharmaceuticals, reflecting a deliberate strategy of distributing scientific infrastructure rather than concentrating it entirely in one or two centers. By the 1970s, IIT graduates were already beginning to feed into both domestic public‑sector engineering projects and into emigration to the United States. That “brain drain” pattern would later, decades on, partly reverse itself when many of those same graduates and their networks became central to India’s IT industry.

Atomic energy occupied a special place. The physicist Homi Bhabha founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1945, even before independence, explicitly to give India a domestic base for advanced physics research. He went on to chair the Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1948, one of the earliest atomic energy programs set up by any newly independent nation. Under Bhabha’s direction, India built Apsara, its first nuclear research reactor, which achieved criticality in 1956 at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Trombay near Bombay. It was the first nuclear reactor built and operated anywhere in Asia, years ahead of several industrialized nations outside the US and Soviet bloc. The program was framed publicly around civilian applications – electricity generation and medical isotopes. It also quietly built the technical foundation that decades later would allow India to conduct its first nuclear test in 1974.

Defense and heavy engineering built out their own parallel institutional ecosystem. A newly independent country bordered by two major conflicts within its first two decades – with Pakistan in 1947–48 and 1965, and with China in 1962, a war in which Indian forces suffered from significant equipment and supply shortfalls – could not safely rely on imported weapons and machinery alone. The Defence Research and Development Organisation, formed in 1958 by merging several existing defense science establishments, became the central body coordinating India’s indigenous weapons and equipment research. Its early decades were marked by frequent delays and technology gaps that later reforms would try to address.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, tracing its roots to a private aircraft manufacturing company founded in 1940 and nationalized after independence, began producing licensed versions of foreign aircraft designs before developing India’s first indigenously designed jet trainer, the HAL HJT‑16 Kiran, which first flew in 1964 and went on to serve as the primary trainer aircraft for the Indian Air Force for decades. On the industrial machinery side, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, established in 1964 through the merger of several state‑owned heavy engineering units, became the backbone of India’s power generation equipment industry. It eventually supplied a substantial share – later estimated at well over half – of the turbines and generators used in the country’s own power plants. Machine tools followed a similar path through Hindustan Machine Tools, established in 1953 with Swiss collaboration, which became a critical supplier of the precision machinery that every other factory in the country ultimately depended on.

Computing arrived in this period too, in a far smaller and more experimental form. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research began building India’s first computer, later named TIFRAC (TIFR Automatic Calculator), starting in the early 1950s under Bhabha’s direction. The machine became operational in 1959, built almost entirely from components designed and assembled in‑house rather than imported as a complete system, since no complete system was readily available to import at any price India could then afford. It remained in use for scientific calculations at TIFR for roughly a decade. A decade later, Electronics Corporation of India Limited, established in 1967 specifically to develop indigenous electronics for strategic sectors including atomic energy and defense, began producing India’s early computers and electronic components domestically. These were not remotely comparable in scale or capability to what was happening in the United States or Europe at the time. They represented a conscious decision that India needed to understand and build computing technology itself.

Agriculture underwent the most immediately consequential transformation of the entire period. India’s food security in the 1960s was genuinely precarious. The country experienced severe droughts in 1965 and 1966 that pushed it toward famine conditions and a level of dependency on American food aid, particularly wheat shipments under the PL‑480 program, that at their peak accounted for a substantial share of India’s total wheat consumption. Indian policymakers, including Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, found this dependency politically and strategically uncomfortable enough to actively push for domestic alternatives.

The response, later called the Green Revolution, centered on agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan’s work adapting high‑yield, semi‑dwarf wheat varieties developed by Norman Borlaug in Mexico to Indian growing conditions. It was combined with a rapid expansion of chemical fertilizer use, groundwater irrigation through tube wells – the number of which grew from a few hundred thousand to several million over the following decades – and mechanization including tractors and threshers. The results, concentrated especially in Punjab and Haryana, were dramatic by any measure. India’s wheat production rose from around 12 million tonnes in the mid‑1960s to over 20 million tonnes by 1970 and continued climbing sharply through the following decade. The country moved from a net food grain importer to near self‑sufficiency within roughly a decade, a shift substantial enough that India has not experienced a famine of the scale seen in the colonial or immediate post‑independence period since. A parallel effort in dairy, later known as the White Revolution, began taking shape around the same period through cooperative dairy models pioneered in Gujarat under the Amul brand. It would go on, through the nationwide Operation Flood program launched in 1970, to make India the world’s largest milk producer within a few decades.

Financial infrastructure was reorganized to support all of this. In 1969, the government nationalized fourteen major private banks, arguing that private banking had concentrated credit in urban and industrial hands while neglecting agriculture and rural development. The subsequent expansion of bank branches into rural India – from a few thousand branches at independence to tens of thousands by the late 1970s – became one of the less visible but structurally important pieces of technology‑adjacent infrastructure. It created the credit and savings channels that Green Revolution farmers needed to purchase fertilizer, seeds, and equipment on any meaningful scale.

By the mid‑1970s, the character of India’s technological base had genuinely changed. It was still, by most global measures, a poor country with enormous unmet development needs. Several of these projects came with real costs: displacement of communities by large dam reservoirs, regional inequality in where industrial investment landed, a defense research establishment that struggled for years to match its ambitions with delivered results, and an agricultural transformation that concentrated its benefits disproportionately in a handful of northern states while leaving others largely untouched. Yet the underlying capability – to build a large dam without foreign engineers running the project, to produce domestic steel and fertilizer at industrial scale, to run Asia’s first nuclear reactor, to train engineers at home instead of sending every promising student abroad, to grow enough wheat to feed the population without permanent reliance on foreign food aid – was no longer hypothetical. It had been built, deliberately and at considerable cost, by a country that had started the project barely three decades earlier with almost nothing to work with.