Where does India stand in the Quantum Computing race?
India began investing in the field of Quantum Computing only in 2017. India is not a famous place when it comes to innovating in deep tech startups. Out of all the startups India has produced so far, only 27 of them are deep tech startups. Most of them revolve around fintech, e-commerce, and other such fields.
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Quantum technologies comprise quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum optics, quantum information processing, quantum internet, and quantum artificial intelligence.
One of the basic objectives being pursued by scientists is the construction of a practical quantum computer.
TIFR led the quantum computing efforts in India in 2012
The group began working on this field in 2012. As of 2012, the only established experimental group in India which is working on superconducting quantum devices is the Quantum Measurement and Control (QuMaC) Lab in TIFR which is headed by Dr. R. Vijayaraghavan. The group became fully operational in Jan 2014. It has already several important publications which include the development of a new type of ultra-low noise broadband amplifier for quantum measurements and a novel three-qubit quantum processor called the “trimon”.
The trimon is slightly different from the works of IBM and Google. In the IBM-Google approach, a qubit is connected only to the neighboring qubits. In the TIFR device, every qubit is connected to every other qubit. If Vijayaraghavan manages to scale his processor to more qubits, he may have a processor that is very efficient in translating algorithms.
In the global race to build quantum computers, India has so far been present only in theory compared to the US, China, and the handful of other European countries that were spending large amounts of money. India had no national programme. It had a number of theorists, but only a few had been trying to build a quantum computing device.
A few experimental research groups started emerging about five years ago, and some of them have made progress. Now the Department of Science and Technology (DST) wants to give them more money, as it realized that quantum computers are essential to tackle problems that will develop in the future.
The trend in 2020
India is quite new to the field, with very few projects under works on the new technology. Last year, the Department of Science & Technology (DST), set up a research project named Quantum-Enabled Science & Technology (QuEST), with ₹80 crores ($11.2 million) funding in an institute in the southern city of Hyderabad.
Nirmala Sitharaman’s Union Finance minister in the Budget for 2020–21, presented on February 1, 2020, proposed Rs 8,000 crore over five years for National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications.
Sitharaman said:
“Quantum technology is opening up new frontiers in computing, communications, cybersecurity with wide-spread applications. It is expected that lots of commercial applications would emerge from theoretical constructs that are developing in this area.”
Companies working in this space in India
Not a lot of startups are working in this space in India. Some of the startups which I came across are listed below:
It is a startup based in Bengaluru and deals with the deployment of complex AI/ML models using optimization hardware. According to Moore’s law, the number of transistors added to a processor chip increases every year but there is a limit to it. So, the models with increasing complexity cannot be left to the mercy of the poor computational power of the existing GPUs. Hence, they devised a hybrid approach comprising of quantum-classical computation tools. They do it using a quantum-classical computer processor called the ASGP (AI System Generating Processor).
Qunu Labs or Quantum Light Labs is a Bengaluru based startup that works on quantum data security. It is India’s first quantum computing based startup that works in the area of Quantum Cryptography. They deal with Quantum Key Distribution Algorithm. The startup also plans to work in the field of quantum random number generator which plays a huge role in the digital cryptography algorithms.
There are also other startups but their roots are not there in India. As far as I know, India still needs to gear up to become quantum ready. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the lagged development of Quantum research in India. Nonetheless, if we have to remain at par with the rest of the world, we need to make India ready for a quantum economy.
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Originally published at https://www.firstqbit.com on July 6, 2020.
