Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday inaugurated ESTIC 2026, a three-day conclave on emerging science and technology, at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. The event brings together researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and students to chart India’s agenda across the technologies that will shape the next decade.
The conclave spans 12 thematic areas, ranging from artificial intelligence to ocean sciences. That breadth is deliberate. Emerging technology is no longer a single sector; it is a web of disciplines in which advances in computing enable breakthroughs in biology, materials, energy and exploration. A conclave that puts AI researchers alongside ocean scientists and space technologists reflects how innovation actually happens: at the intersections.
Visitors to ESTIC 2026 will encounter more than lectures. The programme includes thematic videos, technology demonstrations, documentaries, kiosks and augmented reality and virtual reality experiences. The emphasis on demonstration matters. For students and young researchers, seeing a technology work is often more persuasive than hearing it described. For industry visitors, live demonstrations provide a first sense of what is ready for collaboration and what remains in the laboratory.
A centrepiece of the conclave is Global Connect, a networking event bringing together more than 300 participants from academia, research and industry in India and abroad. In a field where talent and ideas cross borders constantly, such platforms serve a practical purpose: they match a researcher with a problem to an entrepreneur with a product, or a laboratory with a prototype to an investor with capital. Many collaborations begin not in a formal session, but in the conversations around it.
The timing of ESTIC 2026 fits a broader pattern in India’s technology calendar. On Sunday, the Prime Minister inaugurated the Reserve Bank of India’s Data Centre and Cybersecurity Training Institute in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. That event underscored a parallel priority: as India’s digital economy grows, the infrastructure that stores financial data and the workforce that defends it must grow with it. A data centre and a training institute are less glamorous than a new app, but they are the foundations on which digital trust rests.
For policymakers, ESTIC 2026 offers a chance to listen as well as to speak. The researchers and startups gathered at Bharat Mandapam will raise familiar concerns: funding gaps between prototype and product, regulatory uncertainty for new technologies, the shortage of specialised talent, and the difficulty of scaling from a laboratory in India to a market abroad. How those concerns are addressed will determine whether the conclave’s ideas become industries.
For students, the conclave is a window into careers that did not exist a decade ago: AI safety, quantum communications, ocean robotics, synthetic biology and climate technology. The message of such events is that India’s technology story is not confined to software services; it now spans deep science and frontier engineering.
Three days is a short time to chart a national agenda, and no conclave can do it alone. But by gathering the country’s emerging technology community under one roof, ESTIC 2026 sets the questions that will occupy policymakers, researchers and entrepreneurs long after the Bharat Mandapam halls empty.
