We are building for a living, rising, demanding India: Gautam Adani
New Delhi, May 11 (IANS/WISHAVWARTA) Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, said on Monday that India’s path will not be America’s or China’s path because we are not building for an abstract future; we are building for a living, rising, demanding India.
Addressing the ‘CII Annual Business Summit 2026’ here, Gautam Adani said India is building for households moving up, cities expanding outward, factories coming alive, vehicles turning electric, and millions of small businesses waiting to scale.
“India’s advantage is simple. Everything we build will already have demand waiting for it. The task before us is to build the capacity that can keep pace with the demand,” the Adani Group Chairman told the gathering.
In the energy sector, India has made extraordinary progress. As of March 2026, India has crossed 500 gigawatts of installed power capacity. A staggering 53 per cent of this capacity has been added over the past 10 years.
“And India is well on its way to add another 4X capacity over the next two decades to take India to 2,000 gigawatts by 2047. This is not a symbolic progress. This is nation-scale execution – growing rapidly, industrialising deeply, digitising massively and decarbonising meaningfully – all at the same time,” said the billionaire industrialist.
Notably, the GDP trajectory is the best manifestation of the growth story.
“It took India 67 years after Independence to become a 2-trillion-dollar economy. But it took just 12 more years to add the next two trillion,” Gautam Adani emphasised.
He further stated that India is no longer growing through incremental addition.
“India is growing through compounding acceleration. Every road, port, airport, factory, energy asset and data centre augments the next layer of growth. At this pace, India will add the equivalent of a new European economy to its GDP every decade. This is not linear growth. This is compounding – national power,” Gautam Adani noted.
A decade ago, few imagined the scale of India’s mobile data explosion. But once smartphones became affordable, networks expanded, data prices fell, and consumption exploded.
“AI will create a similar surge, but this surge will be far more power-hungry. Data centre capacity that is expected to reach five gigawatts by 2030 could rise to nearly 75 gigawatts by 2047. That is why India must prepare now,” the Adani Group Chairman highlighted.
There is one version of the AI story circulating across global boardrooms. It says AI will eliminate workers. It says technology will replace human judgement. It says efficiency means fewer people.
“I reject this story entirely. India must not import fear from the western world. A country can limit its own future not only by a lack of capability, but also by accepting someone else’s assumptions as truth. India must build AI not as a force that removes opportunity, but as a force that expands productivity, creates new jobs, empowers small businesses and gives Indians the tools to compete with the best,” said Gautam Adani.
When UPI was launched, many considered it just a payment system. That was too small a way to understand UPI. UPI did not simply move money from one account to another. It moved trust into the hands of ordinary Indians.
“It made a street vendor digitally visible. It made a small merchant instantly payable. It transformed the mobile phone from a communication device into an economic instrument. Once trust became instant, commerce became instant. Once payments became frictionless, new markets became viable,” he mentioned.
Once ordinary Indians entered the digital economy, entirely new business models became possible.
“Markets that were invisible became visible. Customers who were underserved became reachable. Needs that had not yet been named became new enterprises. AI will do the same, but at a far greater scale. It will create companies we cannot yet name. It will create business models we cannot yet define. It will create markets that today are invisible,” said Gautam Adani.
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