India is working on a “Gross Domestic Knowledge Product” (GDKP) to identify and define the country’s knowledge assets amid growing global efforts to monetise and “weaponise” knowledge, NITI Aayog member R Balasubramaniam said on Thursday.
“I chair a committee which is trying to put together what is called the Gross Domestic Knowledge Product. No other country in the world has attempted anything like that and it is a challenge even to figure out what is Indian knowledge today before the AI world owns it or co-owns it and then says it is a product of somebody else. So we’re trying to see how you even have a voice,” said Balasubramaniam, speaking at FICCI’s 21st Higher Education Summit 2026.
He said the exercise was particularly important as knowledge was increasingly becoming a strategic and economic asset globally, while Indian knowledge was yet to be adequately recognised in that space.
“Everything is getting weaponized, including knowledge, whether we like it or not. We live in a reality where from oil to trade to knowledge everything is being weaponised. You can buy the libraries of books, use them to be converted into digital material and then destroy those books. We live in a world which looks at monetizing opportunities to an extent which is unthinkable and in a space where Indian knowledge is still not in that space,” he said.
Balasubramaniam also called for higher education institutions to move beyond degrees and focus more closely on competencies as artificial intelligence and other technological and economic shifts changed the nature of work.
He said India was facing a “crisis of competence” as educational institutions had struggled to keep curricula aligned with changing requirements. Qualifications alone were no longer sufficient to indicate whether an individual had the competencies required for a particular job, he said.
Digital fluency, data literacy and the ability to work with AI tools would become increasingly important across disciplines, he said, adding that universities needed to prepare students for technological changes rather than merely respond to them.
He also flagged the shrinking demographic dividend as a major challenge for higher education and the workforce. With fertility rates falling sharply in several southern states, universities in the region could increasingly have to attract students from other parts of India and overseas, he said.
“The fertility rates have fallen and 10, 20 or 30 years from today, universities in the south of India may not even have students who come from the south of India and they’ll start looking at opportunities where students from outside, either outside India or outside their own states will have to start coming there. Already they’re going a lot but the domicility of students going into universities in their own backyards is going to come down,” Balasubramaniam noted.
The number of young people entering economic production would also begin to decline after 2030, while the elderly population would grow, he added.
This demographic shift would make the care economy an increasingly important area of employment and training, he said. Universities and policymakers needed to start preparing for greater demand for caregivers, including by developing recognised training pathways for the sector, he said, adding that there was currently no standardised educational or training framework for such caregiving roles.
“Caregiving is going to be the next in thing, and possibly a robot or AI-based solution would be much less impressive than an actual human giving care and therefore we need to examine what does the care economy look like and are we preparing ourselves for a care economy in a nation where sadly and strangely, a caregiver is trained from as less as three days,” Balasubramaniam said.