TIFAC Archives - Prof Prabhat Ranjan's Blog

We Said Universities Would Be Redundant. We Never Said That About Teachers!

In 2014 we wrote that schools, colleges and universities as currently constituted would be redundant by 2035. Nine years from that deadline, here is what the same chapter said about teachers — and the one recommendation in it that India has ignored.

What Technology Vision 2035 wrote about teachers, and what we have done about it since

Let me begin with a sentence I helped write, which is not a comfortable one to read out on Teachers’ Day.

In 2015, at TIFAC, we prepared Technology Vision 2035 for the country. It set out twelve prerogatives that every Indian should be able to count on by that year, and the sixth of them was quality education, livelihood and creative opportunities. The chapter opens with this: “Schools, colleges and universities as currently constituted will be redundant in 2035.”

There are nine years left on that clock.

Milk, Water, Electrons

Milk, water and electrons look like three different
stories. They are one story told three times: the country builds ahead of schedule, and what the citizen receives lags behind.

The Sector That Stopped Moving

The medical sciences roadmap was the most quantitatively explicit of the twelve. That is to its credit, and it is why the sector can be graded harder than any other.

Halfway to 2035: Marking Our Own Homework

Technology Vision 2035 named twelve prerogatives, ten Grand Challenges and hard figures with a date attached. Ten years and seven months of the twenty are gone.
This is the audit, done in public, against our own numbers.

Viksit Bharat Needs Firm Power: Why Fusion Must Be in India’s Energy Plan Now

India’s electricity demand will nearly quadruple by 2047. Solar and wind cannot carry that load alone. The time to build the next generation of baseload is not 2040 — it is today and why fusion must be a strong part of it.

India’s electricity demand will nearly quadruple by 2047. Solar and wind cannot carry that load alone. The time to build the next generation of baseload is not 2040 — it is today.

Disclosure: The author is co-founder of ASPL Fusion, a private Indian fusion company. This article presents an industry perspective on national energy policy. The policy arguments are grounded in publicly available data; the ASPL programme description in Section 5 is provided as a concrete illustration of what a domestic fusion development path can look like in practice.

At a Glance — For Decision-Makers

708 GW peak demand and 2,100 GW total capacity needed by 2047 — the equivalent of building a new US power grid from scratch.

Intermittent renewables alone cannot provide firm power — grid stability requires large-scale dispatchable baseload even with abundant storage.

Fusion now has serious private capital behind it: Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are structuring power purchase agreements with fusion companies. India risks being a technology importer.

Three budget-cycle asks for 2026: fusion in National Energy Plan · dedicated component development fund · AERB regulatory engagement mandate.

Key Number

India’s Central Electricity Authority projects peak power demand reaching 708 GW by 2047 — four times today’s installed capacity. Meeting it requires 2,100 GW of generation: close to the entire current installed capacity of the US and EU combined. That is the scale of infrastructure build India must manage across the next two decades.

Prof Prabhat Ranjan Listed Among “Visionaries of India” by Outlook Magazine

Prof Prabhat Ranjan has been identified by Outlook Magazine as one of the visionaries to take India towards a $ 5 Trillion economy

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected India to become a $5 trillion economy with the third largest GDP in 2027-28, early in the ‘Amrit Kaal’ on the path to achieving the goal of becoming an advanced economy by 2047. “Outlook” magazine has tried to identify “visionaries” of India under whose guidance, India is moving towards achieving this goal in a special anniversary edition.

Technology Vision 2035: Post Launch Activities and Impact

The study of the impact of the Technology Vision 2035 document is an ongoing process and based on this mid-course correction in strategy is important for the country to move ahead. We have seen good action and progress in certain areas e.g. Waterways. However healthcare sector is still lagging and going by the current trend, we would not achieve the targets set by TV2035. Frequently, authorities responsible for these set a lower target for themselves that does not require a major effort!

After Hon’ble PM launched Technology Vision 2035 on the morning of Jan 3, 2016 (See my blog Making and Launching of Technology Vision 2035), our focus shifted to its impact on the future of India. In that blog, I mentioned that “In the very first meeting on TV2035, I emphasized the importance of being able to communicate the document among citizens at large and policymakers, in particular. I mentioned multiple means of communication that are relevant today: (1) Print Media (2) Electronic Media (3) Social Media (4) the Internet (5) Workshops etc. Each one of these needed their own way of providing information from the document.”