Let’s get one thing out of the way. The incident at the India AI Summit may have come across as an aberration to many, but it wasn’t. The problem was never a Chinese robotic dog being passed off as Indian innovation. That was just a symptom of a deeper malaise – one that has been festering in Indian higher education for years.
In reality, the incident was a perfectly logical outcome of how Indian higher education now functions, especially in the private university ecosystem. Galgotias University is one name. Look closer and you will find many more scattered across the country.
You would agree with me if you had a kid enrolled at one of these private universities. Except optics, enrollment numbers and revenue generation, very few other things matter. Serious research is not even in the consideration set.
The Degree Shops
The robo-dog episode went global because it was ridiculous enough for NBC, Reuters and the BBC to notice. But if you strip away the headlines, you’d see a brutal truth: most private universities in India do not exist to produce research. They exist to sell degrees.
And they do it very well.
Walk into the campus of any large private university today. You’ll see manicured lawns, glass buildings, drone shots in brochures and highway billboards screaming “Centre of Excellence”, “AI-First”, “Future-Ready”, “Global University”.
What you won’t see as easily are credible labs producing original work, faculty with serious citation records or students publishing anything that moves the needle.
Why? Because none of that helps admissions season.
I’ll put in bluntly: Private universities in India are real estate businesses. Their core KPI is not peer-reviewed papers or patents. It’s intake volume, fee recovery, hostel occupancy and brand recall. Research is tolerated only insofar as it can be packaged into marketing material.
This is why robo-dog charade felt so natural. Because performative innovation is fast becoming the default mode for these institutions. Buy something off the shelf, rename it, slap a Sanskrit-sounding project title, throw around a few crores in claimed investment and hope nobody asks uncomfortable questions.
Nobody usually does.
Optics Over Research
The deeper rot, in my view, is incentive design. Faculty promotions are rarely tied to meaningful research output. I can say this with utmost responsibility, having spoken with several professors in my circle.
Administrators are rewarded for year-on-year growing intake. Students are sold campus placement dreams. You will rarely find a private Indian university promoting original thinking and intellectual honesty. Even several government universities follow the same suit.
When research exists, it is often checkbox research: low-impact journals, recycled ideas, conferences nobody attends except for certificates. There is a whole scam operating in the name of research. I will come back to this in a later post.
So when a public platform like an AI summit comes along, the instinct is not “let’s show what we actually know” but “let’s not look small”. Let’s make a splash, let’s get a bigger pavilion, a fancier display, so we appear grand and impressive. The idea is to use deployment in such grand events in the marketing material later. Why? Yes, you got it right – to attract more students by flaunting million-dollar research and world-class education that, in reality, do not exist.
I reiterate that this is not about one university. The private university ecosystem as a whole has enabled this culture. Accreditation bodies look the other way as long as paperwork is in order. Rankings systems reward perception more than substance. Regulators are reactive, not preventative. Everyone benefits from the illusion, until it collapses.
What makes this worse is the arrogance with which these institutions speak. Claims of hundreds of crores invested in R&D are tossed around casually. What they fail to understand is a simple fact that money alone cannot create innovation. Culture does. Talent does. Patience does. Failure does. Sadly, none of these parameters are compatible with annual admission targets.
Why We Keep Lying to Ourselves
Our government loves to talk about India becoming an AI powerhouse. But AI does not emerge from conference stalls and press sound bites.
It emerges from years of boring, underfunded, unglamorous work. It comes from doctoral students who aren’t treated as cheap labour. From faculty who aren’t pressured to double up as marketing managers. From universities that are honest enough to admit they took a serious shot at an invention and failed.
That last sentence is the hardest. Indian private universities cannot say it. Because integrity does not sell.
So instead, we get spectacle. We get imported tech dressed up as indigenous breakthroughs. Administrators rush to blame “miscommunication”. Professors are thrown under the bus. We get badly crafted damage-control statements instead of the intellectual integrity required to admit a blunder.
And yes, this brings global embarrassment. But more importantly, it betrays Indian students. Students who pay obscene tuition fees believing they are entering a serious intellectual institution, only to discover later that the entire structure is a facade built for optics and money.
The System That Made This Ineveitable
The entire incident came to light because somebody posted it on social media and social media is unforgiving. But how many such lies go uncaught every year? Count the so-called “AI labs” that are nothing more than glorified computer rooms. Look at the “research centres” that exist only on websites. Then ask yourself how many degrees are issued with zero intellectual backbone.
If Indian higher education wants respect, it must first give up the obsession with looking impressive. It must accept that real research is slow, invisible and uncomfortable. It must stop confusing infrastructure with intellect and branding with brilliance.
Until then, incidents like this will keep happening. Not because of bad actors. But because our system rewards dishonesty far more than depth.
The robo-dog didn’t humiliate Indian academia. Indian academia humiliated itself. And unless we admit that, no amount of summits, slogans or Centres of Excellence will save us.
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