Category: Featured

This report examines whether India can sustain drone warfare, not merely whether it can acquire drones. Moving beyond the platform-centric terms that have shaped India’s debate, it reframes drone capability as a question of endurance: the capacity to absorb losses, replenish inventories, adapt under fire, and keep producing through a prolonged conflict.

This report assesses the outcomes of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s three-day visit to India from 19 to 21 April 2026, the first state visit by a Republic of Korea head of state in eight years. It tracks the visit’s strategic frameworks, government-to-government agreements, business-to-business deals, and policy announcements, and reads them against the prior arc of the India-ROK Special Strategic Partnership.

This report is a follow-up to an earlier study, “Beyond the Kinetic,” by the same authors, which introduced the Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace as a way of understanding modern conflict.

The report does three things. It maps the market and policy drivers of the boom, including domestic demand, the GCC ecosystem, infrastructure status for data centers above 5 MW, a twenty-year tax holiday for foreign hyperscalers exporting their services, state-level incentive packages, and a dense maze of data localization rules. It then conducts a cost-benefit analysis that questions the dominant claims of technological sovereignty and broad economic gain. Finally, it argues that India must shift from investment facilitation to negotiated extraction, and lays out the concrete templates the government can put on the table: compute for academia, applied R&D testbeds, regional tech clusters, AI-based public service delivery, and a structured renewables and storage push.

VANTAGE is CSDR’s periodic publication that examines active conflicts in real time, asks what they mean for the international order, and captures authoritative Indian perspectives on the consequences that matter most: global stability, regional balances of power, energy and trade, and India’s own strategic choices.

Canada’s relationship with India is often told as a single national story. This report argues it is ten stories at once. It examines how Canada’s provinces, each with a distinct industrial base, resource endowment, and set of India-facing opportunities, are quietly driving one of the most consequential bilateral relationships of the coming decade.