How & why India checkmated Huawei’s salami-slicing moves in top tech schools
Huawei to ZTE came under an unforgiving radar.
In India, too, a similar red line was quietly drawn — well after a top Chinese firm described by the US government as a “national security risk” had easily made its way into India’s apex tech institutes, the famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). It was a note of caution sounded by the director of a leading IIT that woke up the Government of India on the deep inroads that Chinese firm Huawei had made into India’s leading institutes.
That it came in the aftermath of the bloody border clashes at Galwan, meant serious business.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Huawei had just inked an MoU for a first-of its-kind collaboration with a new IIT, was apparently in the middle of high-level discussions with IIT Roorkee and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, and had opened discussions with IIT Madras among others when the first serious red flag came, multiple sources confirmed to ET. All the institutes were at the forefront of India’s R&D on big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, telecommunications — strategic areas key to India’s leap into the third industrial revolution and a critical part of Huawei’s global portfolio.
Taken aback, the Union education ministry, which typically doesn’t monitor MoUs of autonomous IITs, flagged the matter to intelligence agencies and the response was quick and clear.
No institute, especially IITs, were to engage with Huawei in any kind of academic and R&D collaboration. While no formal orders were issued, ET gathers that each IIT was sensitised to national security concerns and the imperative need to not only stay off any such collaboration being discussed but also to dial down and wrap up any existing joint R&D.
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