India–Russia 2025: A roadmap for building a high-tech strategic partnership

The forthcoming visit of President Vladimir Putin marks a pivotal opportunity to redefine the India-Russia partnership beyond its long-standing hydrocarbons and defence anchors. While these pillars will remain relevant, they no longer capture the strategic or economic imperatives shaping the next decade. Both countries are investing heavily in digital public infrastructure, cyber-resilience, artificial intelligence and high-technology R&D. India’s emerging IndiaAI Mission, with its focus on compute capacity and AI safety frameworks, and Russia’s deep research base, demonstrate that both states already possess significant building blocks.

At a moment when access to compute, secure chips and AI model governance is increasingly shaped by sanctions, export controls and supply-chain chokepoints, both sides have strong incentives to explore technology cooperation that enhances strategic autonomy. Financial interoperability is also evolving, with the shift of nearly 95 per cent of bilateral trade into national-currency settlements reflecting a structural adjustment and new institutional channels, including integration between Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS) and India’s Structured Financial Messaging System (SFMS), and exploratory work on digital-rouble and digital-rupee interoperability (TASS). This moment therefore calls for a structured expansion of the partnership into emerging technologies, supported by clear institutional mechanisms that can guide, finance and sustain long-term cooperation.

First, a bilateral Technology and Innovation Commission should be established to coordinate regulatory frameworks, identify priority technologies and structure multi-year funding. India already manages such frameworks with other major partners. The EU-India Trade & Technology Council works through joint working groups on semiconductors, high-performance computing, trustworthy AI and digital governance, and has published outcomes on coordinated semiconductor value-chain mapping and High-Performance Computing cooperation (EU-India TTC). The India-U.S. TRUST (Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology) Initiative has begun aligning the two countries on AI governance, quantum communication, space technologies and strategic trade, including joint quantum network testbed work and cooperation on advanced materials. A comparable architecture with Russia would allow both sides to converge on AI governance, cyber norms, export controls and IP-sharing frameworks-prerequisites for responsible co-development in critical technologies. Institutionalising cooperation also insulates critical projects from external geopolitical pressures and cyclical fluctuations in bilateral trade.

Second, India and Russia need joint technical programmes that demonstrate immediate utility and build confidence. Collaborative testbeds for AI safety, hardware design and domain-specific models-especially disaster-response and low-resource language tools-would allow both sides to pool talent and accelerate applied research. India has deployed AI systems for flood forecasting, while Russia’s EMERCOM uses AI for wildfire prediction and remote sensing, creating natural entry points for shared geospatial and emergency-response AI models. India’s Bhashini programme on low-resource languages could be coupled with Russia’s extensive work in Slavic, Turkic and Eurasian languages to develop multilingual models suited for governance and public service delivery across linguistically diverse regions. Cooperative development of secure-by-design telecom stacks and quantum-safe encryption would address vulnerabilities in critical networks, building on India’s indigenous 5G/6G research trajectory and Russia’s established applied-cryptography ecosystem, including research arms at Skolkovo. These initiatives would translate into verifiable metrics and reproducible toolkits so that technical ecosystems in both countries adopt shared norms rather than isolated experiments.

Third, technology cooperation is sustainable only when it scales into commercial capacity, exports and employment. India and Russia could establish co-investment vehicles that blend public and private capital to support joint ventures in secure chips, telecom hardware, trusted cloud infrastructure and enterprise cybersecurity products. In telecom and cloud infrastructure, Indian manufacturers of 4G/5G radios and Russian producers of secure network appliances could collaborate to serve markets in the Global South seeking sovereign digital-infrastructure alternatives.

Creating mutually recognised certification standards will help firms enter each other’s markets and extend into other geographies.

Talent pipelines-through joint fellowships, translational engineering programmes and start-up incubators-would convert research prototypes into manufacturable products and deepen industrial interdependence in high-innovation sectors. The innovation ecosystems of Start-up India and the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which houses hundreds of deep-tech start-ups, provide platforms for early-stage bilateral ventures.

Diversification into AI, cyber and R&D is a strategic necessity. Reliance on oil and defence hardware confines the relationship to sectors exposed to price shocks, sanctions regimes and procurement cycles. A broader technological partnership builds resilience by embedding cooperation in multiple layers of each economy. It also leverages strong complementarities: India’s scale in digital services, data governance and software talent aligns with Russia’s strengths in fundamental research, mathematical modelling, systems engineering and applied cryptography. Together, these can generate innovations that neither side can achieve independently.

A three-stage roadmap-institutionalising governance, operationalising joint programmes and scaling industrial capacity-provides a structured way into long-term capability. The 2025 Summit offers an inflexion point to embed this approach in the broader strategic partnership. If both countries act with sustained commitment, India-Russia cooperation can move decisively beyond legacy sectors and position itself around the technologies that will shape economic competitiveness and national security in the decade ahead.

Arvind Gupta is an Adjunct Professor of data and digital economy, and head, Digital India Foundation, and Aakash Guglani is Senior Policy Manager, Digital India Foundation; views are personal