In February 2019, a report of the US Congress Subcommittee titled ‘China’s Impact on the US Education System’ noted how China “recruits overseas researchers and scientists” through multiple routes, forcing the country to draw a red line despite some tactical rapprochement on other fronts. China’s ‘Thousand Talents Program’ to hire top overseas scientists in areas like AI and chips was shuttered down, varsities in the US were told to dial down on Chinese funding, Confucius centres were asked to wrap up and Chinese firms from Huawei to ZTE came under an unforgiving radar.
In India, too, a similar red line was quietly drawn — well after a top Chinese firm described by the US government as a “national security risk” had easily made its way into India’s apex tech institutes, the famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). It was a note of caution sounded by the director of a leading IIT that woke up the Government of India on the deep inroads that Chinese firm Huawei had made into India’s leading institutes. That it came in the aftermath of the bloody border clashes at Galwan, meant serious business.
DAMAGE CONTROL
Huawei had just inked an MoU for a first-of its-kind collaboration with a new IIT, was apparently in the middle of high-level discussions with IIT Roorkee and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, and had opened discussions with IIT Madras among others when the first serious red flag came, multiple sources confirmed to ET. All the institutes were at the forefront of India’s R&D on big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, telecommunications — strategic areas key to India’s leap into the third industrial revolution and a critical part of Huawei’s global portfolio.
Taken aback, the Union education ministry, which typically doesn’t monitor MoUs of autonomous IITs, flagged the matter to intelligence agencies and the response was quick and clear. No institute, especially IITs, were to engage with Huawei in any kind of academic and R&D collaboration. While no formal orders were issued, ET gathers that each IIT was sensitised to national security concerns and the imperative need to not only stay off any such collaboration being discussed but also to dial own and wrap up any existing joint R&D. The message was unequivocal and the wheels moved swiftly, many people in the know told ET on condition of anonymity. “At that time, there was no red flag as far as Huawei was concerned. It was like any other major foreign firm working in high tech sectors. Also, consider the fact that funding for research grants is tough to get in the government-run IIT ecosystem. So, when they came offering generous funding for research grants and with no questions asked, obviously many of the faculty were enthused by the prospect. That’s how several such research projects took off. However, once the government advised us to discontinue them in view of national security, it was immediately acted upon,” an IIT director in the know told ET on condition of anonymity.
Quietly, the first big IIT MoU was pulled back, funds returned and all discussions with Huawei for similar collaborations planned across other IITs and IISc were closed one by one, ET has gathered. Several research projects generously funded by Huawei across other government institutes were also nudged to closure. In April 2021, the board of governors of the National Institute of Technology in Rourkela pulled back a September 2020 MoU signed with Huawei for AI talent development, as per minutes of the 30.04.2021 meeting. Private institutes followed next. Fullfledged innovation centres, like the one funded by Huawei at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Bangalore, disassociated themselves from the company. In fact, every Huawei-linked association came under the radar, with MoUs withdrawn or their execution stalled. India also closed the doors on China-funded Confucius centres in 2022, as first reported by ET.
HUAWEI-INDIA STORY
The Huawei-India story, however, is much older and took seed almost two decades back — one of the first software R&D expansion made by the Chinese firm in a foreign country. In September 1998, IIIT Bangalore was established at the International Tech park in Bengaluru, bringing new age tech courses, amid the data and internet boom taking root in India.
A year later, Huawei got its foothold in India and the first academic collaboration was born between the Chinese company and an Indian academic institute. The association thrived. Looking to spread wings beyond this, Huawei opened purse strings. By 2015, Huawei became the first Chinese company to set up a full-fledged R&D centre in India at Bengaluru, pumping in $170 million and recruiting 2,700 engineers at first go — 98% of these were Indian, as per a Huawei press statement from the day.
By 2017, the Bengaluru centre was the largest of its several overseas R&D centres and was looking at filing nearly 400 tech patents. The university/academic outreach was critical to the expansion. It was in 2016 that IIITB signed an MoU with Huawei technologies India Pvt Ltd, granting scholarships to iMTech students. The model worked. Nearly a dozen colleges across the country went on to ink MoUs with Huawei for scholarships or talent development, starting with private institutes and gradually shifting gears to NITs.
By 2019, Huawei had signed an MoU with NIT Karnataka to provide ‘Scholarships for Excellence’ to students of engineering colleges selected through the Joint Entrance Examination. The annual scholarship was Rs 50,000, to be given to meritorious students of second, third and fourth-year Bachelor of Technology (IT) course, the MoU said. The Huawei that took off in India from a small space at the IIITB campus went on to fully fund the ‘Innovation Hub’ at the same institute in 2018. The lab focussed on software-defined networks. Huawei helped mentor and guide students on the same, developing a trained pool in the process. Over 40 such students were either placed with Huawei or went on to study further at Chinese institutes, those in the know told ET. The Huawei-R&D human resource axis became even stronger. Mission IIT was the next logical step.
MISSION IIT
Huawei soon realised that the kind of cutting-edge R&D and human resource pool it was looking for was well concentrated at the top echelons of the Indian education system –– IITs and IISc. “IITs have always been on the list of every big company and that’s when Huawei also went there. It would have been a great achievement as technology and funding was just about coming together with the IITs. In fact, a lot of work went into the exercise from identifying the right faculty to lab facilities and scope of collaboration. Money was never a barrier,” a person familiar with the Huawei outreach initiatives told ET.
In December 2019, a Huawei China team visited IIT Delhi to explore “future areas of research opportunity”. In 2020, Huawei Technologies India signed an MoU with IIT Delhi to carry out AI research projects on Unified Multimodal index and Multi Language SPO Extraction. Rs 1.45 crore granted by Huawei, as per IIT Delhi’s annual reports. Amid Covid-19, it generously funded an IIT Delhi project on infection-free fabric. At IIT Bombay, a ‘database research grant’ was received from Huawei IITB in 2019-20. IIT Kharagpur’s Complex Network Research Group worked on a Huawei funded project on ‘anomaly detection using logs’ and AI from 2020. An academic on data and ML in the IIT ecosystem who collaborated on one such project explained the Huawei move at IITs.
When Huawei came, it was building telecom and software products but there was a dearth of talent pool, he pointed out. “Indian institutes with several youngsters enrolled in undergraduate courses provided that pool. The collaboration with IITs also offered another plus — high quality R&D at PhD and research level. Several Huawei grants had no deliverables tied up as well, they were purely fund grants to develop new and futuristic technological solutions in the field of AI, ML and so on,” he told ET. The scope of collaboration, however, was set to amplify with the IIT MoU that is said to have promised significant funding and clear tech outcomes attached. Similar high-level ones were planned at other IITs and the IISc till the alert to GoI changed everything.
“In hindsight, one can say that the idea at Huawei may have been to get deep information on the India R&D matrix and probably influence policy directions on these new technologies through IITs as they are involved with practically every big national programme. However, we did not have any inkling or any indication of these concerns back then. We were after all collaborating with many others as well, including US companies in these sectors. However, once the government nudged us on it, we quickly wrapped up these projects,” he added.
Another researcher said while the Centre had serious national security concerns over Huawei’s reach extending into the IIT ecosystem, there was also a worry over the inroads it made into private institutes. That is how even the IIITB innovation hub — the first collaboration — also disassociated with the Chinese firm even though the institute was a public-private-partnership project, quite independent of the government.
