Kharagpur (West Bengal), Aug 18 Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, turned philosopher, historian, and futurist at IIT Kharagpur on Monday as he urged India’s brightest engineering students to choose a life of "legacy over salary".
Addressing the institute’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, Gautam Adani said the choice facing young Indians today was stark: join multinational firms in safe jobs abroad or stay in India to build a nation that aspires to be a $25-trillion economy by 2050.
"One train takes you to a salary. The other takes you to a legacy. And only one train carries the pride of building Bharat," he said, recalling his own decision at 16 to leave Ahmedabad for Mumbai with little more than conviction in his future.
Tracing India’s journey from political independence to technological dependence, Gautam Adani argued that true freedom in the 21st century would only come with self-reliance in semiconductors, energy, defence systems, and data sovereignty. "This is the freedom we must now fight for — the freedom of Atmanirbharta — if we are to be truly free," he said.
The Adani Group Chairman reminded students that the pace of technological disruption today is unlike any other period in history. "This is not transformation at 1X speed. It is 10X. It is 100X. And it is accelerating towards 1000X, as AI starts to build AI, LLMs start to write LLMs, robots start to build robots, and machines start to teach machines," he noted.
The billionaire industrialist admitted that Indian corporates, too, bear responsibility for the "innovation deficit" and called for industry to invest more in research and development. "If we corporates do not step up, we will remain users of foreign breakthroughs and never be originators. This is a future we cannot accept," he said.
Gautam Adani announced the Adani–IIT Platinum Jubilee Change Makers Fellowship, as well as the setting up of "living laboratories" in renewable energy, logistics and airports to allow IITians to test their ideas on real-world challenges.
The speech was peppered with anecdotes from his entrepreneurial journey — the building of Mundra Port against the odds, the expansion into energy, and the creation of India’s largest airport network. "I talk about Mundra, Khavda, 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," he said.
As he closed, Gautam Adani left the students with a four-point call to action: "Be the new freedom fighters of Bharat, build first for Bharat, fortify our foundations, and march as one team for Bharat."
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