When people talk about technology infrastructure, they usually mean semiconductors, data centres, and AI models. But the layer that decides how well these technologies work is the data underneath them, and India still has to build it.

At a panel discussion on 'The invisible infrastructure of the new tech order' at TechSparks 2026, moderated by Chhavi Mahajan, Chief Content Officer, YourStory, the panellists said India’s advantage will come from owning trusted, context-rich data in fields ranging from language AI to biotech.

Arvind Pani, Founder, CoreMantle, an AI data intelligence startup, said data is the one part of the technology stack that cannot be swapped out. “You can continue to replace compute. You can continue to replace the application, but you cannot replace the data,” he said.

Ankit Bagaria, Co-founder and CEO, Loopworm, an insect biotechnology company, said the gap is especially wide in biopharma, where too much work still happens through trial and error. Better data, he said, could cut the time it takes to bring a product to market.

Bagaria said biotech deserves the same attention as AI, quantum and chips, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted that India still imports about 73% of its key materials, including active pharmaceutical ingredients and reagents, from China. And although the country supplies a large share of the world’s vaccines by volume, that accounts for only about 5% of the market by value.

“We have operated in the biosimilar space for a very, very long time, where somebody else is discovering the molecules for us,” he said.

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