PM Modi Opens ESTIC 2026 Conclave at Bharat Mandapam

India's effort to turn laboratory science into usable technology took centre stage on 27 October 2026, the opening day of the Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation Conclave (ESTIC) 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. The Ministry of Science and Technology set out the day's proceedings on 28 October 2026. More than 5,000 delegates from many countries took part, among them scientific leaders, policymakers and founders of deep-tech startups.

The Prime Minister's call

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the conclave and asked scientists, researchers and young innovators for results that can be measured, scaled up and put to use, achieved within an operating horizon of three years. His argument was that discoveries must travel out of the laboratory to settle real problems, reinforce self-reliance under Atmanirbhar Bharat and serve human welfare. He restated the goal of setting global benchmarks in frontier fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, advanced materials and biotechnology.

From buyer to co-creator

Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Dr Jitendra Singh said the country had moved from being a buyer of technology to a future-ready co-creator of it. He put the startup count at roughly 400 in 2014 against more than 2.3 lakh today, with an estimated 50 to 60 per cent of them based in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Calling India's genetic and phenotypic diversity a resource for biotechnology, he pressed for home-grown strength in gene synthesis, systems biology and nuclear medicine, and cited recent legislative reform including the SHANTI Act.

Twelve priority domains

Principal Scientific Adviser Prof. Ajay K. Sood argued for a tighter fit between basic research, industrial scale-up and regulation, and set out the conclave's 12 core thematic priority domains. Among those he named were quantum communication, semiconductor fabrication, generative and autonomous artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and the Deep Ocean Mission.

Two Nobel laureates

Prof. Joachim Frank of Columbia University, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017, gave a plenary talk on cryo-electron microscopy for target discovery and drug design, covering high-resolution single-particle work and the three-dimensional picturing of macromolecular complexes. Sir Richard J. Roberts, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993, spoke on split genes, taking in gene splicing, microbial genomics and restriction-modification enzymes along with uses in agriculture, public health and diagnostics.

Sessions and the money behind them

Three parallel technical sessions ran through the day. Advanced manufacturing was chaired by CSIR Director General Dr N. Kalaiselvi, with a keynote by former DRDO Chairman Dr G. Satheesh Reddy. Generative and autonomous AI was chaired by IndiaAI Chief Executive Officer Saurabh Vijay, with a keynote by Prof. Mitesh M. Khapra of IIT Madras. The third session, on system and synthetic biology, was built around the BioE3 strategy and its Understand-Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle. An evening panel on science and disruptive technologies for Atmanirbhar Bharat was chaired by Prof. Sood. Curtain-raiser sessions had pointed to the Rs 1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund and to ANRF mechanisms as the routes that carry deep-tech work towards commercial products.