Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Innovation Forum

Bill Gates
February 29, 2024
New Delhi, India
AS DELIVERED

Namaste and thank you.

It's been a long time since I've been here at IIT-Delhi and it's phenomenal all the great progress that has taken place since then. In a sense, my first connection with India came because of the IITs.

One of the great people who worked for me said that he would go over to India and hire about 15 people who had been students at IIT and that would strengthen Microsoft's engineering capabilities.

At the time, we only had a few hundred people, but even so, it was so hard to find amazing engineers, I thought that was a good idea. At the time, the Indian press said this was a terrible thing because all these great people were leaving the country. The US press said this was a terrible thing, all these people coming from another country.

But I think now, over 25 years later, we can say that was a phenomenal thing both for India and for the United States and of course for Microsoft itself. A number of those people are the ones who came back to India, started up the offices here and earlier this week, I was down in Hyderabad at the biggest site for Microsoft development in India celebrating the 25th anniversary at a time where Microsoft now has more than 25,000 amazing people here in India doing work.

And if I think back on my Microsoft career and the wonderful people that I got to work with and why I enjoyed that so much, a very high percentage of them are people who joined from India.

First and foremost, though, in that list would have to be Satya Nadella, who we're so lucky to have as the CEO.

Well, I'm now looking at India in a far broader way than just the Microsoft lens. I'm lucky enough through the work of the foundation to look at innovators in India who can help with all kinds of problems, starting with health, but also agriculture, gender, climate, so many areas that we need fantastic Indian innovation.

And Indian innovation really gets stronger all the time. One thing you can count on is that because India is a big country, people understand its innovation is not really valuable at small scale, and nor is it valuable if the cost is so high that only a small percentage of the people can get access to it.

And so this is a fascinating time. The need for innovation to deal with many different challenges that I'll talk about is greater than ever. But the pace of innovation is also rising to meet that challenge. I'd say you're all lucky to be here and have gotten an incredible education.

The complexity of how we take technology, and we shape it, you'll get an opportunity to play a big role there. And so, of course, I'd suggest that not only should you consider your career in terms of the traditional measure of success, which is the financial impact, although that's fine and important, but also to consider whatever role it is you take on, how that relates to achieving social equality.

We have many problems in the world that only by taking that point of view can we shape innovations to improve the world as much as possible.

Well, let me start with health because that's the area that the Gates Foundation does the majority of its work in.

When we got going, we saw that there were vaccines, like one for diarrhea, that was only available in the rich countries. It's called the rotavirus vaccine. And that was deeply ironic because the kids in those countries had almost no risk of having that disease kill them. And the rest of the kids, including at that time here in India, who were at great risk, did not have that vaccine.

And so I was excited to see here was a challenge that taking the resources I was lucky enough to have from Microsoft and applying them, we could literally save millions of lives. And in fact, that has absolutely come true.

But a key part of that story is the relationship that the foundation built with the Indian vaccine manufacturers. They were the ones who, with resources from us and the right strategy, managed to make not only that rotavirus vaccine, but measles vaccine, pentavalent vaccine, pneumococcus vaccine, an incredible number of important vaccines.

And so, 20 years ago, Indian kids weren't getting those vaccines, even measles, which of course is so, so important. And now the progress is phenomenal. Virtually all the babies born in India get a full set of these vaccines. And that is the primary reason that something I consider a miracle has happened, which is that a third as many children die every year before their fifth birthday than did 20 years ago. And that's despite the population increase.

Now, you know, most people when you ask them don't know that because, you know, it's in terms of news, what day were they supposed to run that headline? You know, it's been a gradual thing year by year, vaccine by vaccine. But it's incredible that over that time span that adds up to millions and millions of children.

We also saw during the COVID pandemic that Indian capacity to make low-cost vaccines was very, very important. And so we worked with many of these companies to get their vaccines out quickly and make them broadly available.

So, the story of vaccines is a phenomenal one. And there's still even in that one area, there's still a lot more to do. We don't have a vaccine for tuberculosis. That's the number one infectious disease killer in the world, killing 1.8 million people a year. For about two years, COVID got ahead. TB was number two. But now we're back to the situation that's prevailed for the last century, which is TB is very much in the lead. And of course, we should be able to get a vaccine.

The health challenges we need to take on go even beyond infectious diseases. If you had to say what's the health innovation I'm most excited about right now, it's the deep insights we're gaining into malnutrition.

Malnutrition is a terrible thing. And not only does it make a child more fragile and therefore more susceptible to all diseases, but it also means that even the children who survive, if they were malnourished, their physical body and their mental capacity never achieves their full potential. So the fact that in Africa, over 40% of kids have to suffer that, that is an incredible tragedy.

And the story of understanding what's going on there is an incredible tale of science. It has required understanding the microbiome. It has required mass sequencing. We had to invent a capsule that you could swallow so we could see exactly what was going on with the kids who had inflammation and who didn't have inflammation.

And I would say we're probably on a five-year path to have very cheap tools that will bring malnutrition down by over 90%. The same thing I think will happen with anemia. In fact, we're even closer to a solution on that. And as we've studied that, we've seen that solving anemia not only helps the pregnant mother and her mental state dramatically, but also is the biggest thing we've ever done to improve the mental development of the child.

And so there's a lot that the sciences are now on the verge of explaining to us. In fact, these great insights that come from human biology also give us the understanding of how we can take livestock and plant seeds and make those far more productive, far more nutritious, even in the face of climate change that is a huge challenge that I'll get into.

Another place that India leads, but there's a lot more that all of you can be involved in driving forward, is digital public infrastructure. No country is more able to take government benefits and get them out efficiently and effectively to their citizens than India. You would have expected rich countries or others to do that, but in fact, they did not. And so that basic structure that starts with identity and bank accounts and payments is just foundational.

And as part of this visit, I'm now seeing how that foundation is being built out, built out in agriculture with profiles of farmers to understand what they need and give them advice, built out with health records so that we can help people not only with infectious diseases, but the challenge that's coming in the future with the growth of non-communicable diseases being a huge thing. And that digital public infrastructure will help us with climate problems.

I was in Odisha yesterday, and what they showed is that they've registered the farmers and registered what type of crops they grow and what land they own. And so, they're able to take all the data about pests, partly informed by local reports, partly from satellite data, and actually immediately respond before any infestation gets to a large area. So, before they had this digital system in 2018, there was an outbreak that affected most of the state's paddy crop.

And it's actually that year, 2018, where working with Samagra, they started to register those farmers. And now they literally have a control center. You know, when you walk in, you think, wow, this is agriculture? But, you know, you've got a command center and maps and people doing queries and sending out messages. You know, I felt very much at home, although I don't come from a farming background.

But more recently, when they faced an infestation that would have been every bit as bad if they hadn't had this new system, their ability to respond quickly, to give advice, to talk to all the neighbors, they avoided that infestation, and 90 percent of the damage that would have caused. And so that all starts, you know, with an Aadhaar identity, listing those farmers, getting the information, making sure it's up to date. And the cost to do that, you know, because of the miracle of digital technologies, is very, very low.

Now, that's the kind of system that works even without the recent breakthrough we had in artificial intelligence. I have to admit, I'm someone who was a little unsure when computers would be able to read and to write. I mean, after all, even when I was young, this was the dream. AI, you know, how did the brain work? How are we going to match that in software? And I have to say, we underestimated how hard that would be.

So, for decade after decade, although AI did some things, this one thing of reading and writing seemed to be beyond its capability. And so the scale up of the large language models now shows us that's completely within reach. And so the number of ways we're going to apply that, particularly as we make it more efficient, as we make it completely accurate, extends to so many applications. Even now, there's a prototype where those farmers can get advice, where the extension experts are made far more efficient by having that.

And it's not that hard to create these applications. If you have the data, you have the same information you use to educate humans, you can build these agents and make sure they're highly accurate. I'd say the impact of that will be even greater in education than any other domain.

We've always known that having an individual tutor who knows what you've learned, knows how to motivate you, that that's the fastest way to learn. And even classroom teaching, we compare to that. And so now these AIs, with many great projects going on to create them, offer the potential for every student to have that type of tutor.

A great example in India is Wadhwani. They're analyzing the samples of Gujarati children reading and building a model of how they learn the native language and looking at where students struggle, what the phonetic model is, what order you should teach that, what kind of practice you need, and how to get those readers, many of whom are behind their grade level, but if you use the software in the right way, they can catch up. And that will, of course, be extended to all Indian languages.

Nandan Nilekani’s organization, People+ai, is working on AI for education as well. And this is great news for students. They don't have the time to give the feedback, the time to personalize the material, and yet now they can engage the student in how they should work with these tutors.

A great example would be if you have a fourth grader who's fallen behind on something like fractions, assigning that and making it available through a low-cost cell phone is very straightforward. A startup called Sarvam.ai, which was co-founded by an IIT-Delhi alum, is piloting a bot that can read the textbook with the student and make it far more understandable. So it's connecting into their text, but making it far more engaging.

And, of course, if we can supercharge education, if we can take every child born in India and give them a very high-quality education, the potential that unlocks is phenomenal. And, of course, it won't stop in India. Whatever's learned here as a pilot, organizations like the Gates Foundation will make sure that gets used all over the world, including in Africa.

So I think you have a very bright future. No matter what your specialty is, whether it's engineering or discovering new drugs or policy work, AI advances will give you opportunities and force you to think through these new systems in a very deep way.

I'll bet when I come back here, say it's five years from now, some of you will be able to tell me about new technologies you've created to inspire students, to help farmers, to solve health care problems, and to help us with climate. I didn't want to leave that out, a very important challenge that India will be deeply affected by. Another area that I work with and I see great promise now that we're focused on the problem and that we'll be using these latest tools to redesign steel manufacturing, cement manufacturing, all the industrial processes that today are responsible for these emissions. So you have many ways that you can make a difference. You're already machau.

So let me just finish by saying I'm excited to see the great things you'll be able to do for India and for the world. Thank you.