India has a history of venturing deep into scientific researches and achieving feats that even developed nations like Japan and Germany haven't achieved before. Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) or Mangalyaan was one such example which demonstrated India's scientific prowess. And now, India has set out to build quantum computers, that will not only place the country in league with select countries including the US, China, and the Netherlands among others, but it will also help in improving the state of national security as quantum-level encrypted information becomes a common communication standard.
However, building quantum computer is tougher than building supercomputers that can perform up to 200,000 trillion calculations in a second. And so, in what is being described as the Phase 1 of India's quantum computing program, the country will be laying out the basic infrastructure that is needed to promote research in this field.
To make this dream a reality, the Department of Science & Technology has set up a programme called Quantum-Enabled Science & Technology (QuEST). As a part of the programme, it will invest a sum of Rs 80 crore in a span of three years to facilitate research in this field.
Notably, DST held the first ever meeting for its QuEST programme at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad earlier this week between January 8 and January 9. The meet up saw nearly 50 delegates, including academicians and representatives from various governmental agencies-- ISRO chairman K. Sivan, NITI Aayog member Vijay Kumar Saraswat and India's principal scientific adviser (PSA) K VijayRaghavan, in attendance, The Print reported.
During the course of the meeting, the participating delegates discussed a road-map that would help in laying the groundwork and acquiring human resource for building quantum computers in India. It would also entail researchers building devices like logic gates, sensors and other devices that will ultimately contribute in building quantum computers.
In case you are confused what quantum computers are, here's a simplified explanation: quantum computers are essentially computers that use the principles of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems and perform calculations that would take billions of years for ordinary computers to perform. Instead of using bits (0s and 1s), which lie at the heart of how our personal computers and other electronic devices communicate, quantum computers use qubits to perform computations. They are, essentially, the electronic equivalents of the subatomic particles that lie at the base of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics wherein objects can act as a wave and as a particle at the same time.
Meanwhile, once the basic work has been done, i.e. after three years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), and Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) are expected to jointly pool in a sum of Rs 300 crores to push QuEST to Phase 2, that would ensure that India's quantum computing programme matches international standards.