To Trade Coders for Legos, India Needs a Better Deal

For a quarter-century, software services have been India’s calling card. No longer. The next 25 years belong to tokens — the Lego bricks of the artificial-intelligence era. As AI agents require quintillions of them to supplant human effort, India is pitching its tent there. But is that wise?

New Delhi has offered a 20-year tax holiday to any foreign company setting up inference hubs — token factories that convert electrons into intelligence — to meet AI agents’ 24/7 workload. Given that these algorithms will be empowered to act autonomously, writing their own programs, where will this leave the country’s 6 million coders?