TRANSCRIPT OF ADANI’s SPEECH AT 75 YEAR CELEBRATION oF IIT KHARAGPUR

Source: ANI News Youtube Channel

So thank you for all joining. Namaskar, distinguished faculty, esteemed guests, and my brilliant student of II Kharagpur. It is a true honor to join you for this Platinum Jubilee session. When the current director, Dr. Suman Chakrabarti, and former director, Dr. Partha Chakrabarti, extended me the invitation, I did not even check my calendar. When the nations, two most brilliant Chakra birthdays, ask you to be part of such a milestone, the only answer is an immediate and wholehearted yes.

My dear friends, this is my first visit to Kharagpur, and I was deeply moved to learn that this very ground was witness to our nation's struggle for freedom. It is indeed humbling to stand here where many of India's courageous freedom fighters were once imprisoned, some even younger than the student before me today. One story of an inmate that somehow lingers in my mind is that of Trudev Kumar Choudhury, who in 1931 at just 19 years of age was already a fearless freedom fighter. Imagine just 19 standing here I can almost hear his fearless voice still sounding through the walls of the Heijli jail. Na thame, na juke, rahe matru bhumi amar, gagan gagan guje sada, vande matram ka swar.

That cry of Vande Matram was more than slogan. It was a promise, a promise sealed in blood and sacrifice, a promise of India's unbreakable resolve. a promise that freedom would live on beyond those who gave their lives for us. And it is about this meaning of freedom that I wanted to talk to you today.

My dear friends, in 1947 we broke the chains of our land, yet in the 21st century our nation can be independent and still be bound by dependence. But three days ago, we marked our 79th Independence Day and it is clear, we stand at a major inflection point. The world is moving from a conventional war to technology-driven wars of power and our ability to prepare will decide our future. Because the wars that we have to fight today are often invisible. They are fought in a server farms and not in trenches. The weapons are algorithms, not guns. The empires are not built on land, they are built in a data center. The armies are botnets and not battalions.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. In terms of technology dependence, 90% of our semiconductors are imported. One disruption or sanction can freeze our digital economy. In the case of energy vulnerability, we import 85% of our oil. A single geopolitical incident can restrict our growth. When our data crosses India's borders, every bit of this data becomes raw material for foreign algorithms, creates foreign wealth and strengthens foreign dominance. And in the case of military dependence, many of our critical systems are imported, bringing our national security to the political will and a supply chain of other nations.

This is the freedom we must now fight for, the freedom of self-reliance, the freedom of Atma Nirvata if we are to be truly free. 80 years ago, here in the Izhli Jal, young men and women fought for the right to govern our land. That same fight continues. Only the weapons have changed. And this is what I want every student here to take back. You are the next generation of freedom fighters. Your innovations, your software code and your ideas are today's weapons. You will decide whether India takes command of his knee or surrenders it to others.

Because this is not My dear friends, I have been an entrepreneur since the age of 16. I have navigated multiple cycles of our disruptions, many moments of our transformations and built businesses through both crisis and opportunity but I can tell you with absolute convictions that the age of transformations now unfolding before us is unlike anything I have seen.

And the battlefield is not just about protecting our nation's border, it is about securing our technology leadership and ensuring we are able to stay at the forefront of our global innovations. It is about redesigning every business, re-imaging every industry and rewriting every rule of the game. So we lead and not just participate at a low cost players in the global race. Because as we all know, in a world of robotics and AI, cost advantages will vanish overnight and we can quickly lose our ability to compete.

This is not a transformation at 1x speed. It is 10x. It is 100x. And it is accelerating towards 1000x. AI, start to build AI. LLM, start to write LLM. Robots, start to build robots. Code, start to write code. Machines start to teach machines and discoveries start to fuel more discoveries. And this is why I call it our second freedom struggle.

The world has never seen an industrial and intelligence revolutions of this case. Here is what I can tell you. Tomorrow's trillion-dollar value disruptors will bend others to their will. And some of them will go on to dominate the world like no company has ever done before. Companies will become more powerful than any nations, many nations. And over the next decade, several companies that today seem unbeatable will vanish. They will disappear, not because they lack resources, but because they could simply not compete at the pace and scale needed.

And I will say that same stands true for educational institutions because the educational institutions too must transform they must move at the speed of change drive cutting-edge research and yet to be accountable the real world impact. This is no longer about producing brilliant graduates. It is about producing brilliant patriots. that graduate armed with ideas, discipline and the will to make India unshakable.

The brutal truth is when knowledge is a commodity, when skills can be downloaded and when AI can crack engineering problems in seconds. We must ask, what is the future value of an engineering or technical degree? How should we prepare? the lifespan of a technical knowledge has collapsed from years to months, maybe even weeks. This means the gap between academic theory and industry reality is widening faster ever before and the new currency is the abundance abundance of a bold ideas abundance of lightning speed adaptations abundance of a relentless reinventions.

In this new round of battle it is the most brilliant minds that India will need and you my dear professors are the custodians of these minds. Minds trained on this very ground, trained to think beyond the textbook, trained for rapid inventions, and trained to carry the courage of discovery as a national duty. While this is not a call to give up the heritage of our top institutions, it is indeed a call for designing a different future before it is too late.

Let me now talk about the Indian corporates. And it begins with the honest admission that we in industry must serve equal responsibility for the innovation deficit India faces. After all, we hire from these colleges, and the best among them are government funded. We stand on the shoulders of public institutions like ISRO, BARC, DRD, ICMR, NCL, and many more. These have given us the inventions, breakthroughs, and discoveries that form our launch pads. from Isro Chandrayaan to Aadha, from UPI to vaccine research, from freight corridors to our renewable grids.

It is worth reflecting that it is the government that has built the foundation of our modern economy. And this model will not adequately sustain in the race we are entering. If India is to lead in the age of transformative technologies like advanced materials, biotechnology, deep tech, and many others, we must carry our share of the nation's innovations burden, translated not into marketing slogans, but into the budget allocations, world-class laboratories, and risk capital.

We must provide platforms where young minds can explore and even fail without fear. If we corporates do not step up, we will remain users of our foreign breakthroughs and never be the originators. This is a future that we cannot accept.

So what is a possible path forward? If speed and scale are the defining challenges of our academic institutions, then the answer lies in blurring the lines between where education ends and where enterprise begins. In the industrial era, institutions and corporates operated in parallel lengths. Academia produced graduate, industry consumed them. In the world we have now entered, victory will most often belong to the owners of IP, and nations will weaponize this IP, the governments controlling the IP distributions.

Therefore, we must master partnerships that unite diverse stakeholders, enable seamless talent flow between labs and industry, and embed IP sharing and funding models that reward both groundbreaking research and rapid commercializations. And there are many examples to learn from. In Silicon Valley Stanford's deep ties with a venture capital and industry have seeded tech companies from Google to Tesla with the startups and academia feeding each other's growth. In the case of a biotech synergy, the Boston-Cambridge cluster, so Modena and its vaccines emerged directly from MIT and Harvard labs, which was then accelerated by corporate funding.

Therefore, universities must push the boundaries of research, and corporates must push the boundaries of executions. University must focus on breakthroughs and corporate must focus on scaling the breakthroughs. And together we must create impact not just in the markets but in the very fabric of our Indian society.

And so, let me propose some ideas. Together, we will create living laboratories here at IIT Kharagpur. across high-impact sectors that reflect the very challenges India must lead in.

First is our renewable energy. By 2030, India aims to lead the world in our renewables. At Adani, we are building the world's largest renewable energy park in Khabda in the Kach district of Gujarat. 30 GW of capacity across 500 square kilometers imaging IIT KGP students, co-developing AI-driven grid balancing solutions, real-time predictive maintenance and sector-wide optimizations tools.

Second is ports and logistics. Adani Ports moves over 400 million tons of cargo annually. As the world's most integrated logistics player, even a single day delay can ripple through supply chains. IIT KGP talent can design machine learning, late-birth scheduling, autonomous container handling, and real-time logistics optimization systems.

Third is an airport and a smart mobility. Adani Airport handles 100 million passengers a year across seven of India's busiest hubs. These complex ecosystems spans transport, security, energy and a passenger's experience. IIT KGP engineers could pioneer real-time cloud predictions, intelligent baggage handling, and IoT-enabled operations to set a new benchmark.

Building on these initiatives, we are launching the annual Adani IIT Platinum Jubilee Changemakers Fellowships coordinated by IIT Kharagpur and covering every IIT. His mission is to channel the nation's top talent into high-impact projects that advance national priorities. framework creates a playbook for any major corporates to partner effectively with our top institutions and together we can accelerate India's sheer scale of talent into a force that in a decade can be a parallel to Silicon Valley.

Now let me address the student in this audience, many of whom may be wondering am I not too young to really make a difference? And the best way I can answer is tell you my own story and hopefully you will have a few takeaways.

My dear young friends, It was 1978 and as I walked onto the Ahmedabad railway platform awaiting the Gujarat mail to take me to Mumbai, I held two tickets in my hands. In one hand was a second-class ticket bought after 30 minutes in a crowded station queue. In the other hand was my ticket to freedom. At 16 years of age, like many of you, I too stood at a crossing. One track lead to the predictable safety of school, the other to the vast unknown of the city of Mumbai.

But in my heart, there was a single unshakable belief that the train I was about to board was not just taking me to freedom in Mumbai, it was giving me the freedom to make my own choices. The freedom to build my life with my own hands.

In Mumbai, my first job was shorting diamonds and before long I was trading in diamonds that is where my real education began trading teaches you the loss is not the enemy hesitations is And I realize something deeper. Only those who are truly free-minded make good traders because you learn to embrace risk, to make fast decisions, and to be comfortable with incomplete information or losses you incur. The speed of decision-making was to become my first operating philosophy for life.

By the age of 19, I found myself back in Ahmedabad running my brother's polymers factory. I realized how integrated manufacturing and supply chains were not just background operations, but the core engines that decided who would dominate. It taught me the value of understanding and owning end-to-end integrated processes. This learning became the second operating philosophy that would guide every venture I would thereafter build.

Then came the crisis of 1991. I was 29 when India was forced to open its doors to liberalizations. It was the start of a massive policy change. For me, with my willingness to take risk, it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. I moved swiftly and stepped into polymer trading. Fast forward and just three years later, we had overtaken everybody and built India's largest trading house. We then took it public. That was the birth of Adani Enterprises. I had turned 32.

But success has its own way of revealing that you lay, and I realize that while I was a very good trader I did not have an anchor without real assets in the real economy I had no real foundations one market crash and I could be swept away that is when the third operating philosophy become clear to me you cannot build your empire on on a ground you do not own. And this took me to Mundra that was to become my karma bhoomi.

When I first announced my intentions to build a pot in Mundra, most people thought I had lost my mind not just because I had never laid a single brick in my life but because I choose to build the pot within one of India's largest marshlands I I still recall that when I presented the idea, some of the bankers laughed and asked, Mr. Adani, how do you expect us to finance land that is under the water? And they were not wrong. Mundra had no access, no industries, no precedent.

And a fast forward, and in less than three decades, Mundra became a continental scale logistics engine, moving an astonishing 250 billion metric tons of cargo every year. And today, we run one of the world's largest integrated logistics networks, made up of 21 national and international ports, rail networks, inland container depots, warehouses, and fulfillment centers.

Hereafter, from ports, we moved into energy. And starting in 2007, we built the world's largest single location, coal-based private power plant of 4,200 megawatts. And along with it, we also built India's first thousand kilometers high-voltage DC transmission systems. Then we took over Mumbai's distribution network and followed it by building the world largest solar plant of that time, 770 megawatt, all in just nine months. And we continue expanding today.

In less than two decades, our energy portfolios spawns generation, transmission, distribution, LNG, LPG, city gas distributions, solar panel and wind turbines manufacturing, EV charging, batteries, hydrogen. And we are building at Khaavda the world's largest hybrid renewable energy park over an area five times the size of Paris.

Thereafter, from the gateways to the oceans and gateways to the deserts, we turned to the gateways of the skies of India. And six years ago, we stepped into airport business. Today, we own the largest fleet of airports, controlled by any single entity anywhere in the world. We move 100 million passengers annually, managing 28 percent of India's air passengers, and We also manage 40% of India's air cargo.

We are commissioning the Navi Mumbai airport later this year, which when complete will handle another 90 million passengers. And around each airport, we are creating urban ecosystems where air travel will merge seamlessly with commerce, industries, retail, hospitality and residential living. No company has ever conceptualized such an integrated ecosystem at this scale.

My young friends, I talk about Mundra, Khaavda, our airports, because they were born not just from my spirit of entrepreneurship but also from my optimism that the India growth story is unstoppable. I have learned that any visionary private sector group can achieve scale only when it moves in steps with the policies of a visionary government. And over the past decade, this mutual belief, the government's belief in India's potential and my belief in the government policies, gave us the runway to build at a pace that that has made us India's largest infrastructure company.

My dear students, the same is even more true for you. If you align your ambitions with India's rise, the peak of your careers will unfold alongside the peak of India's power. By 2050, when you are in your prime, you will be part of a 25 trillion dollar Indian economy, shaping global debates, writing the rules and setting the pace for the future. No other nation offers his youth an opportunity of this scale therefore I always say there has never been a better time to be in Indian.

And so, my dear friends, as I prepare to close, I leave you with four principles that I believe will define a greater Bharat in our time.

First, you are the new freedom fighters of Bharat. Eighty years ago, within the cold walls of the Hijli jail, young men and women, your age, fought for freedom. today your weapons are ideas your ammunitions is innovation and your fight is for a sovereign India that submits to none. Ijli ki gunj, Viro ki jaan, Tera junun, Bharat ka maan.

Second, build fast for Bharat. From the fishermen of Kutch to the farmer of Kharagpur, our responsibility is to Bharat first. If we do not build for 1.4 billion of our own, we surrender to foreign flags. Atmanirvara Bharat, Sapka Nara, Dunya mein Chamke, Tiranga Hamara.

Third, fortify our foundations. Infrastructure, technology, intellectual property, these are the roots of our freedom. Our nation, standing on borrowed soil, cannot hold its head high. Apni dharti, apni pehachan, Bharat Gunjay Bharat Mahan.

Fourth, march as one team for Bharat. Walk along, speed as possible. walk together, greatness is inevitable. When academia and industries fuse into one mission squad, India is unstoppable. Thank you.

And so, my friends, remember, Trideep Chaudhary at 19 locked in the Hizli jail for seven years, And yet he returned to fight again for your freedom and mine. Remember if I could take a train to Mumbai at 16 with nothing but belief, then you, with your knowledge and heritage can go much further. And remember, soon in your hands will be two tickets. One to a comfortable life, maybe a foreign company, a safe job. The other a ticket to stay, the drive to build for Bharat to join this second freedom struggle.

One train takes you to a salary, the other takes you to a legacy. And you must decide which train you will take -- salary or a legacy. Only one train carries the pride of building Bharat. Therefore, I hope you stand tall and your journey begins with these words: No, I'll go and leave here, my name is So, go, build so strong that no fear can chain us. Stand so tall that no empire can bend us. Rise so high that no force can stop us. Our Bharat awaits you.

Vande matram. Jai Hind.