Gautam Adani's Rs 100-Crore Vision To Secure India's Civilizational Future

Industrialist Gautam Adani has outlined a Rs 100-crore initiative to revitalise India's educational landscape and protect its civilisational memory. The announcement came at the inaugural Adani Global Indology Conclave, held at Adani Corporate House (ACH) in Ahmedabad, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education's Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) division.

The conclave brought together experts in Indology, technology, and culture from India and abroad. Speaking to the audience, including Jagadguru Shankaracharya Shri Avimukteshwarananda Saraswati ji, Gautam Adani said studying India's knowledge traditions is a national priority, not just an academic subject.

He said India's strength over the centuries came from its civilisational confidence. “When a civilisation knows who it is, its economy knows where it must go,” he added, highlighting how cultural understanding supports economic growth.

Gautam Adani recounted memories from his childhood in Banaskantha in north Gujarat, where his mother narrated to him the Ramayana and Mahabharata. He described these stories as more than folklore. "These stories were not folklore but formative lessons, introducing me to devotion, duty, and the essence of dharma."

While tracing the collapse of India's ancient learning systems, he spoke about the destruction of Nalanda and Vikramashila, the dismantling of India's education under Macaulay and the taking of manuscripts by colonial powers. 

Adani said today's threats were more subtle but just as serious, with artificial intelligence becoming a new guardian of cultural memory. “The new invaders are not armies but algorithms,” he said. AI systems trained largely on Western data risk flattening complex Indic concepts such as dharma, shraddha, and purusarth. 

Adani outlined three major risks posed by AI to India's civilisational heritage: invisibility of manuscripts, cultural compression and alien judgment that misinterprets Indian traditions.

To counter these challenges, Adani proposed a five-point strategy: Bharat Knowledge Graph, a digital repository linking texts, thinkers and ideas to ensure AI learns authentically from Indian sources; India-centric Indology corpus, a benchmark to test AI understanding of Indian philosophies; Strengthening human loop by involving scholars to contextualise and correct AI outputs; Investing in human guardians to establish Indology-AI chairs and nurturing scholar-technologists fluent in Sanskrit and coding; and making every college a new Nalanda, signifying the transformation of campuses into centres where ancient wisdom meets modern innovation.

As part of this vision, Adani announced a Rs 100-crore founding contribution to support the Bharat knowledge graph and train scholars to safeguard India's intellectual legacy.

“Only Bharat will define Bharat,” he concluded. He highlighted the urgent need to shape AI and education around India's own knowledge systems so future generations get authentic answers about concepts like dharma.

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