Dr Samir Saran : India's New Kind of Power

Dr Saran frames the current era as one defined less by single shocks and more by deep structural shifts in power and technology.

In NZ as the Prime Minister’s Fellow 2025, Dr Saran has been speaking in Wellington to audiences at the Asia New Zealand Foundation and elsewhere. 

In his assessment, specific forces have transformed the 21st century into something fundamentally different from the one that preceded it. The first of those forces is the rise of China as a tightly controlled, party‑led state with global economic reach, and growing military and technological weight.

The second is the emergence of powerful non‑state and quasi‑state actors, from tech platforms to developing-world militias, whose influence is amplified by the internet and digital networks.

Together, he believes, these changes overturn many of the assumptions that underpinned the post‑Cold War order and in 2025 are forcing countries to rethink how they secure prosperity, sovereignty and stability.

He describes India as on course to become the world’s first true “development superpower”: a state whose global role is focussed on solving the everyday problems that define life for billions of people, rather than in projecting military might or dominating intellectual property or scientific development.

Hunger, illiteracy, gender inequality, poor health care, patchy connectivity and dirty energy remain acute problems in India. But the country continues to develop feasible ways to tackle these challenges, and those solutions, he says, are immediately relevant to a large share of humanity.

A development model for export

Dr Saran portrays India’s recent progress as driven less by cutting‑edge scientific breakthroughs and more by a distinctive public‑private model.

Firstly, the state builds digital and physical infrastructure, sets rules and provides targeted subsidies, then private firms and social entrepreneurs design business models that make it viable to serve low‑income customers at scale.

Cheap mobile data, universal bank accounts linked to digital identity, micro‑insurance, low‑cost solar power, LED lighting and extensive food security schemes are all expressions of this approach.

Dr Samir Saran & Asia NZ Foundation CE Suz Jessep at a recent Wgtn roundtable / Image AMC

He says India has made huge strides in reducing extreme poverty and expanding basic services by treating the poor not as passive recipients of aid, but as participants in markets, shaped specifically by smart regulation and technology.

“This development model is India’s most important export” he says. He sees growing demand from other developing countries for practical know‑how on building digital public infrastructure, designing financial inclusion schemes, and delivering welfare more efficiently.

Instead of the traditional donor‑recipient dynamics we are so used to seeing in the development sector, Saran emphasises peer‑to‑peer learning and community‑level impact in India : projects like rural electrification, clean water supply, health and education are meant to benefit citizens directly, regardless of which government is in office.

A third way great power

Historically, Saran notes, India has been a major economic actor for much of the last two thousand years, often ranking among the largest global economies.

Today, although its share of world GDP is still a modest 4% or so, it contributes a much larger share of global growth, and that gap is likely to widen as the economy expands.

Politically, however, he insists that India does not fit the familiar mould of existing great powers. “Unlike classic empires, India does not seek overseas bases, colonies or territorial control. Unlike some contemporary major powers, it does not push an explicit ideological project abroad” he says.

Instead, Saran presents India as a third kind of large power: one that aims to underwrite public goods and partnerships without the usual associated hegemony. He points to disaster relief missions, vaccine supplies, infrastructure projects and capacity‑building initiatives across Asia, Africa and the Pacific as examples of how India tries to add value without demanding alignment.

In his view, this posture allows India to be a credible partner to countries that are wary of both American dominance and Chinese expansion, and it gives New Delhi more room to manoeuvre in an increasingly fragmented world.

Managing multi‑alignment: US and Russia

This philosophy feeds directly into India’s approach to its two most important external relationships, with the United States and Russia.

With Washington, Saran sees a bond between two noisy, argumentative democracies that both consider themselves exceptional and indispensable. Long before the current era of defence deals and strategic dialogues, he stresses that scientists, businesses and universities in the two countries were working together.  

Agricultural collaboration that helped underpin India’s Green Revolution is a good example. This deep societal connection, he suggests, has often outlasted periods of diplomatic chill or economic sanctions such as the current 50% tariff imposed on India by the Trump administration.

The Russia relationship, in contrast, is rooted in decades of defence cooperation and shared strategic interests. He regards Russian support as being central to building credible deterrence in a tough neighbourhood, including through the joint India-Russia development of advanced weaponry.

He makes the point that Indo‑Russian systems like the BrahMos missile now serve the security needs of countries such as the Philippines, which face pressure from China and receive broader defence backing from the United States. In this sense, he argues, the India–Russia partnership still contributes to a more balanced regional order rather than undermining it.

Ukraine, oil and moral dilemmas

India’s close ties with Moscow have drawn sharp criticism in western media since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, particularly over New Delhi’s purchase of discounted Russian oil.

But Saran rejects the claim that India is “funding” the war in Ukraine by pointing to the fungible nature of global energy markets. “If India does not buy a given cargo”, he says “another customer will”.

He points out the irony of refined products made from Russian crude in Indian refineries going to European buyers, illustrating how deeply integrated and morally messy the system has become.

Yet Saran does not minimise the gravity of Russia’s actions.

He regards the assault on Ukraine as a direct challenge to principles that India has long defended in the UN system, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the prohibition on aggressive war.

The difficulty, as he tells it, is that India’s two main partners – the US and Russia – have both repeatedly breached international norms in recent decades, from Iraq to Crimea and beyond. That dual reality strengthens his conviction that a more genuinely multipolar world, with stronger and more representative multilateral institutions, is needed to constrain the worst behaviors of powerful states.

Digital public goods and democratic pressure

Domestically, Saran casts India’s digital transformation as the product of democratic pressure as much as technological ambition.

Politicians in a poor but fast‑changing country cannot survive electorally unless they improve everyday lives within a few years, and digital tools offer a way to do that at scale.

He describes a two‑tier architecture: the publicly owned “India Stack” of digital identity, payments, records and platforms that every citizen can access, and a competitive “lifestyle” layer where private firms innovate on top of that foundation.

India Stack is a set of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and digital public goods that form a large-scale digital infrastructure for identity, payments, and data management in India. 

This model helps the state deliver welfare and services more efficiently, while giving entrepreneurs a common infrastructure on which to build businesses that target every segment of society, from street vendors to urban professionals.

Climate finance and a green Marshall plan

On climate change, Saran’s central concern is the misalignment between where emissions are growing and where climate money flows. Most future emissions under business‑as‑usual scenarios will come from emerging and developing economies that still need to expand their energy use, yet the bulk of climate finance remains parked in rich countries, where opportunities for deep cuts are more limited.

“Governments have signed the Paris Agreement, but banks have not” he says. Financial institutions continue to prioritise perceived safety and short‑term returns, even as the world drifts closer to dangerous climate tipping points.

He calls for a new global compact on climate finance, akin in spirit to a “Green Marshall Plan.”

The idea is to use public guarantees, multilateral development banks and pledged funds from advanced economies to de‑risk large‑scale private investment in green infrastructure across the global South.

Rather than handing money to governments directly, he envisages mechanisms that protect investors while directing capital into renewable power, resilient infrastructure and low‑carbon industry in places where they can prevent new emissions and support development.

For him, allowing persistent poverty in regions like Africa to serve as a form of de‑facto mitigation is both morally unacceptable and ultimately self‑defeating.

In an era when energy‑hungry technologies such as AI data centers threaten to consume ever more fossil fuels, he argues, "The world must understand that climate responsibility cannot be separated from economics."

Dr Samir Saran is featured in the latest 'Asia Insight' Podcast.

Asia Media Centre