The slogans are getting shorter. We started with "Make in India," which mostly involved robots bolting together imported Chinese components in sheds outside Chennai. Now, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has moved the goalposts. At a recent AI summit, he pitched a new one: "Create in India."

It’s a pivot. A rebranding. A hope that if we say the word "create" enough times, the algorithmic gods will stop eyeing our back-office processing jobs with a hunger for automation. Vaishnaw’s pitch is simple on the surface: India shouldn't just be the world’s tech support desk or its assembly line. It should be its engine room. He wants a mission—complete with the usual government-mandated fervor—to turn the country into a hub for intellectual property and high-end content.

But slogans don’t write code. And they certainly don’t pay the bills for the millions of graduates currently staring at a hiring freeze in the IT sector.

The timing is convenient. We’re currently watching the traditional Indian outsourcing model walk slowly toward a cliff. Generative AI doesn't need a 22-year-old in Bengaluru to write basic Python scripts or summarize legal documents. It does that for the cost of a few kilowatt-hours. So, the government is doing what governments do best when the old industry starts to smell like mothballs: they announce a Mission.

This isn't just about painting pictures with Midjourney. Vaishnaw is talking about jobs—lots of them. The idea is to build a "creator economy" that scales. But there’s a massive, expensive elephant in the room. You can’t create at scale without compute. And compute is the one thing India is currently begging for.

The government recently cleared a $1.24 billion budget for its "India AI Mission." It sounds like a lot of money until you realize that a single cluster of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs can eat a chunk of that for breakfast. We’re trying to build a creative powerhouse while stuck in a global queue for the very silicon that makes "creation" possible. It’s like trying to start a trucking company when you don’t own any trucks and the dealership has a three-year waiting list.

There’s a deeper friction here, too. Creation requires a certain level of messiness. It requires the freedom to fail, to offend, and to poke at the edges of the status quo. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment in India is tightening. We have a new Digital India Act looming and a penchant for sending "notice-and-takedown" orders to anyone who creates something the bureaucracy doesn't like. You can’t tell a generation to "Create in India" while keeping the delete button within such easy reach.

The ministerial rhetoric suggests this mission will link up with the existing startup scene. But look at the numbers. Funding for Indian startups took a 60% nosedive last year. The "easy money" from SoftBank and Tiger Global has evaporated. Now, the government wants to fill that vacuum with "missions." It’s a bold gamble. It assumes that state-led initiatives can manufacture the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle innovation that usually happens in spite of the government, not because of it.

Vaishnaw pointed to the "democratization of technology" as the catalyst. It’s a nice phrase. It sounds good on a stage with a polished floor. But the reality on the ground is a bit more jagged. We have a massive divide between the top tier of IIT-educated engineers who are already leaving for Palo Alto and the millions of vocational students who are being told that "AI is the future" while they learn on hardware from 2018.

Is "Create in India" a roadmap or a distraction? If the goal is to move up the value chain, we’re late to the party. The U.S. and China have already cornered the market on the foundational models that everyone else is just building "wrappers" around. To truly create, India needs its own models, its own data sovereignty, and its own chips. Right now, we’re mostly just renting someone else’s intelligence and putting a local sticker on the box.

The Minister is right about one thing: the old ways are dead. The "service provider" era is sunsetting, and something has to replace it. But missions and summits are the easy part. The hard part is convincing a risk-averse banking system to fund a "creator" who doesn't have a physical factory to offer as collateral.

We’ve seen this movie before. We had the "Year of the Startup." We had the "Digital Revolution." Now we have the "Creation Mission." Each time, the branding gets sleeker, and the promises get louder.

If the government wants us to create, they might want to start by making it less of a bureaucratic nightmare to simply exist as a small business. Otherwise, "Create in India" will just be another phrase that looks great on a LinkedIn banner but does very little for the guy in Pune wondering why his coding degree is suddenly worth less than a ChatGPT subscription.

How many missions does it take to build a single GPU?