UK-India Technology Security Initiative

Kanishka Narayan Excerpts

Tuesday 28th April 2026 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Kanishka Narayan)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Alec. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (Dan Aldridge) for so expertly introducing this debate on the UK-India technology security initiative.

Technology and my early upbringing in India have profoundly shaped my life, so it is a particular privilege to respond to this debate on behalf of the Government. When my family moved from Bihar to south Wales, we came with a simple aspiration: to take the opportunity to work hard, to contribute and to build a better future. Technology played a pretty key role in it. At school in Cardiff, catching up with a new education system, I depended on the local public library computer. Access to those dusty old public PCs was formative in transforming my education and changing the trajectory of my life. I reflect on that, because the UK-India tech security initiative is not just about geopolitical security. It is about scaling opportunity in communities right across the UK.

Indian investment has already created over 1,800 jobs across the UK. Following the Prime Minister’s visit to Mumbai in October, we have secured a further £1.3 billion in direct investment. Britain’s significant leadership on the world stage is clearly delivering concrete returns for our communities in every part of our country. The UK-India technology security initiative will go further still: it will create good, well-paid jobs in the UK, build our children’s skills for the future and drive investment in every part of our country.

I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Weston-super-Mare and for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards) and other Members for their contributions to the debate. Their remarks have underlined how the UK-India relationship is not abstract or remote, but is lived every day in constituencies like theirs, through families, through businesses, through schools and through public services. That living bridge is the foundation on which our partnership rests.

My hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare is right to challenge the outdated perceptions of India today. India has the highest growth rate in the G20. It has been the second largest source of foreign direct investment in the UK for six years. It is also one of the world’s fastest-growing technology powers, underpinned by a thriving ecosystem of innovation, entrepreneurship and digital transformation.

It is no exaggeration to say that our future prosperity depends on our ability to drive innovation-led growth, to secure the supply chains and technologies on which our economy relies and to build a strong research base and skills future so that British people and businesses can thrive. The UK cannot deliver those objectives alone. The technologies that will define the coming decades are global by nature, and success depends on our trusted partnerships.

The Government agree with my hon. Friend that partnership with India is therefore a strategic necessity. Our bilateral relationship has gone from strength to strength, with technology and innovation firmly at its core. That progress was underscored during the recent visits in both directions by our Prime Minister and Prime Minister Modi when the UK-India vision for 2035 was agreed. Those visits also saw the signing of the landmark comprehensive economic and trade agreement with India. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth pointed out, it is our most economically significant bilateral trade deal since leaving the European Union. It is expected to increase bilateral trade, which is worth £47.4 billion a year, by £25.5 billion and to increase both Indian and UK GDP by nearly £5 billion a year in the long run.

The UK and India are natural tech partners, with major Indian tech companies like Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro already expanding in the UK, supporting jobs, productivity and innovation across our economy. Dozens of Indian firms and entrepreneurs are investing here in Britain, creating the jobs and growth of the future. Linkfields, an AI company based in Hyderabad, is investing £10 million in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Mastek, whose representatives I met in India and which is located in Mumbai, is opening an office in Leeds and an AI centre in London, creating 200 skilled jobs including 75 apprenticeships. EdSupreme, which is using AI to help people with physiotherapy, is investing £10 million across England and Wales and creating 100 jobs.

That is why the UK-India technology security initiative exists. It is a landmark partnership, bringing into sharper focus collaboration in frontier technology across telecoms, critical minerals, semiconductors, AI, quantum, biotechnology, healthtech and advanced materials. It is clear that working closely with India allows us not only to open new opportunities for our businesses and make sure that our technologies rely on secure and trustworthy foundations, but to work with a partner that is increasingly setting the global agenda. That was evident this year during my visit to India for the AI summit, which underscored the global role that India is now playing in convening Governments, industry and academia across every part of the world.

Alongside the Deputy Prime Minister and an 18-strong delegation of cutting-edge UK businesses and 13 UK universities, we delivered on investment and talent commitments set in train during the Prime Minister’s earlier visit, with commitments secured from Indian companies such as Hexaware, Nagarro and CoRover to expand their UK footprint.

I also saw at first hand the breadth of commercial interest that the UK has in India. Our partnership is focused on driving that innovation across businesses in our countries. That was evident when I spent time at the British Council with the founder of ElevenLabs, a great British AI company, celebrating students and future founders shaping our two tech ecosystems. That is what the UK-India technology security initiative is designed to achieve.

We have already delivered several joint AI innovation projects together through the UK-India joint centre for AI, working on the development of AI innovations in priority areas such as healthcare, climate, energy, agriculture and finance. The joint centre will also play a cross-cutting role, enabling the safe adoption of AI across other TSI sectors, including telecoms and wider digital infrastructure.

Our co-operation extends to advanced connectivity. Working together to shape future communications networks will help to provide seamless coverage, even in the most remote areas of our countries, and underpin innovations in healthcare, smart city infrastructure and autonomous vehicles. We are delivering on this through the India-UK Connectivity and Innovation Centre, with an initial £24 million in joint funding. The centre will drive innovation in how AI is used in telecoms networks, in non-terrestrial networks such as satellite internet, and in telecoms cybersecurity. I will flag to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, that this will include opportunities for Belfast and for Northern Ireland—an ecosystem of which I have personally seen the strengths, particularly in cyber-security.

The technology security initiative is already delivering in biotechnology and health technology, sectors that matter both for our economic growth and for our resilience. In February, the UK biotech and pharma SME delegation visited Mumbai and Hyderabad to strengthen UK-India collaboration in biomanufacturing and pharmaceutical innovation.

We are also collaborating on innovative technologies in femtech, with a letter of intent between the National Institute for Health and Care Research and India’s Department of Biotechnology. By bringing together expertise from both our countries, this partnership has the potential not only to improve health outcomes for women, but to support economic growth by driving innovation, attracting investment and strengthening our life sciences sector.

The TSI will secure supply chains, as my hon. Friends the Members for Weston-super-Mare and for Tamworth highlighted. Through the UK-India critical minerals guild, we are strengthening joint capabilities in critical minerals; I will closely consider its collective feedback and its particular observations on the partnership on critical minerals. Backed by £1.5 million in funding, phase 2 will now extend the scope of our joint observatory, further developing digital data infrastructure on the critical minerals value chain and establishing a new satellite campus at the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad.

The TSI is a strategic investment in our future. We are committed to its delivery. Just last week, our National Security Adviser led bilateral discussions in Delhi on the India-UK Technology Security Initiative, agreeing that the next phase of the TSI must prioritise business engagement and growth.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare again for securing this debate and for highlighting something I feel personally, which is that notwithstanding our historic connections, what most ties the UK and India together is that we are two countries chasing the future. We are chasing a future built on the foundations of our people-to-people and business-to-business connections. I look forward to continuing this work as our partnership deepens, so that we can deliver further benefits for the United Kingdom.

Question put and agreed to.