As far as companion technologies go, 2025 saw artificial intelligence and robotics being clubbed together, even though the latter hardly catches the average person’s attention. Humanoid robots will not invade us anytime soon, but industrial automation is poised for further leaps. 

Don’t be misled by the popular home-cleaning robot Roomba’s parent, iRobot, filing for bankruptcy in December. “Unfortunately, that’s a bad example [of good automation],” said Ranjit Date, “because it was nothing more than a vacuum cleaner on wheels.”

Date knows the difference. He retired in April as managing director of Wipro-Pari, a role he held after Wipro Infrastructure acquired Precision Automation & Robotics India, better known as Pari, in 2020. Date had co-founded the Pune-based company three decades earlier. By FY20, Pari had clocked Rs 500 crore in revenue; the acquisition terms were never made public.

Ranjit Date

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As someone who built India’s earliest standalone robotics company, Date is going back to basics because he believes “in our lifetime” there’ll be robotic assistance for specific human tasks, whether we like it or not. Human labour-led manufacturing will disappear in 10 years, but India, which today backs domestic manufacturing with subsidies, needs to hurry to stay in the game. 

Edited excerpts from a conversation:

India is making a serious effort to boost manufacturing, but there’s no commensurate effort on robotics or industrial automation. What is at risk here? 

Human labour-based manufacturing is likely to vanish in 10 years. At volume, industrial and humanoid robots will be available for under Rs 10 lakh, while the cost of manpower, already at Rs 3 lakh per annum per shift (Rs 9 lakh for a three-shift operation), will keep moving up. 

With the use of AI in robotics, fast robot programming and continuous performance improvement are possible, reducing the time and cost of deployment. Processes, quality control, and applications that are infeasible with human limitations will all make human-based manufacturing non-competitive. 

Then the strong winds of de-globalisation will require that plants be moved to local markets, even if they are high labour-cost countries. India’s strategy should be based on its engineering capabilities to deploy robotic manufacturing at scale globally. 

To implement this strategy, India must have a local ecosystem—technology localisation, a local supplier base, a developed supply chain, a talent pool, customer capabilities development, and a capital base for funding both R&D and initial capital investments.