Robotics & automation

Story hook

In a Maruti Suzuki body shop in Manesar, Haryana, 5,000 robotic arms spend every minute of every shift welding car frames. A single robot does in 90 seconds what once required a team of seven welders working an hour. The line produces a car every 22 seconds. None of those robots are Indian — they are made by Fanuc (Japan), KUKA (Germany now Chinese-owned), ABB (Swiss- Swedish), Yaskawa (Japan). India imports almost every industrial robot it deploys.

Eighty kilometres south, in a clean room at TCS Research, Hyderabad, an engineer named Suchitra is teaching a warehouse robot to recognise damaged packages. The robot is built on ROS (Robot Operating System), uses NVIDIA Jetson embedded GPUs, and runs an Indian-trained computer vision model on top. Last month her team shipped the system to Flipkart's Bengaluru fulfilment centre — India's first end-to-end domestically built warehouse-robotics deployment.

The same week, at AIIMS Delhi, a surgeon used a Da Vinci Xi surgical robot (American, $2.5 million) to perform a prostatectomy with a 3 mm incision. Down the corridor, an Indian startup SS Innovations demonstrated a $1 million indigenous surgical robot — the SSI Mantra — and announced its first export to Indonesia.

Robotics is the field where India is simultaneously a massive importer, an R&D power, and a rising exporter — all at once. The Mains question is: can India become the third before it stays stuck as the first?

Why this matters for UPSC

Robotics and automation are tested in UPSC Mains and Interview every year, usually framed around employment, Industry 4.0, Make in India, defence applications, agriculture, and ethical / legal questions. Prelims has begun probing specific technologies (cobots, exoskeletons, surgical robots, AGVs) and government schemes (PLI, NSC, Bharat Robotics). The topic crosses into Economy (jobs, productivity), Defence (UGVs, robotic soldiers), Health (surgical robots), and Society (AI ethics).