When the brain becomes the interface: Why India must prepare for the neurotechnology era
In January 2026, Anduril launched the AI Grand Prix challenge for autonomous drone racing, with a prize of $500,000 to one winner and a job at the company. The rules allow for software modifications and not human pilots or hardware modifications to fully autonomous drones built by Neros Technologies, an American manufacturer of small unmanned aerial systems. One team brought something outside the rule book: a biological computer built from cultured mouse brain cells, wired to control their drone. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wrote on X: “At first look, this seems against the spirit of the software-only rules. On second thought, hell yeah.” That moment —living neural tissue piloting a machine — is not a stunt. It is a signal.
A new abstraction, not just a new device
Every era of computing is defined by its dominant abstraction. Engineers once flipped switches; then came assembly language, then Python, then the graphical icon. Each step moved further from the machine and closer to human thought. Intent-based computing takes this to its logical terminus: rather than translating thought into keystrokes into code, it reads the thought directly — not a motor command (”move finger”) but an anticipated outcome (”open that file”). Research in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2025) formalises this using ideomotor theory: actions guided by anticipated sensory consequences, not explicit commands. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) built on this principle decode goals, not gestures.
The science is already here
In 2025, Carnegie Mellon University’s Professor Bin He published in Nature Communications a result that deserves more attention in Indian policy circles: an EEG-based BCI — non-invasive, no surgery, no implant — that enabled 21 experienced users to control individual fingers of a robotic hand in real time, achieving 80.56% accuracy on two-finger tasks and 60.61% on three-finger tasks. This is strategically important as this study proves that high-dexterity control does not require invasive surgery and the manufacturability and deployability of such technologies at scale.
At the invasive end, Neuralink implanted its N1 device in Noland Arbaugh, a 30-year-old paralysed from the shoulders down, on 28 January 2024. Within weeks, he was controlling a cursor through thought alone. Complementing this, a Stanford team published in Nature a speech neuroprosthesis that decoded intended speech in an ALS patient at 62 words per minute, thereby approaching conversational pace. Even more remarkably, the BrainNet study of 2019 at the University of Washington demonstrated human-to-human information transfer via EEG without words or screens, achieving 81.25% accuracy across five experimental groups. Thought-to-thought communication is a peer-reviewed result, not science fiction.
Neural data can expose political beliefs, emotional states, and private deliberations that an individual would never voluntarily disclose — and may not even be consciously aware of.
The patent race
Global BCI patent activity covers over 2,160 unique patent families from 664 organisations. The United States and China have filed comparable volumes since 2010 with Beijing alone registering 484 BCI patent applications in 2024. Neuralink holds 87 patent documents across 31 families covering electrode arrays, surgical robotics, on-chip neural processing, and AI-driven neuroimaging. Apple’s patent describes earbuds measuring EEG, electromyography, and galvanic skin response simultaneously. The applications cited range from seizure detection to cognitive health monitoring. Synchron, a rival BCI firm, announced a partnership with Apple in May 2025 to integrate its implantable device with Apple’s ecosystem for users with severe paralysis. Meta has moved faster. In September 2025, it launched the Neural Band — a $799 wristband bundled with Ray-Ban display glasses, detecting electromyographical signals in the arm’s nerves. In a peer-reviewed Nature study published in July 2025, it demonstrated 20.9 words per minute of handwriting input through thought alone.
India’s share of the global BCI market stands at approximately 2.5%. Its share of the global patent landscape does not feature in published analyses. That absence is itself a data point.
What governments are spending
The US NIH BRAIN Initiative allocated $402 million in FY2024, producing the highest-resolution map of human brain tissue ever made: 50 million connections between 140,000 neurons within a single cubic millimetre. In FY2025 the allocation was $321 million. The EU’s Human Brain Project spent €600 million over a decade.
China’s Brain Project committed approximately $750 million in its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025). Japan’s Brain/MINDS programme ran for ten years with a total budget of $350 Million. India lacks a dedicated national brain mapping or neurotechnology research program at the scale of peers, with no centralised funding commitment or coordinated agenda across institutions like NBRC or IITs. Recent IIT Madras efforts (announced 2025) aim for large-scale human brain mapping data release within 18 months, but these remain project-specific rather than national policy-driven initiatives.
Language, education, economy
If a student’s attentional state and cognitive load can be tracked in real time — consumer EEG headbands for this purpose are already commercially available — the classroom becomes a feedback loop between brain state and teaching. Who owns that data? India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, does not address neural data. Neither do the laws of most countries. Economic disruption will be asymmetric: the risk is not merely displacement but a cognitive gap between those augmented by intent-based interfaces and those without access.
The NeuroRights Foundation at Columbia University proposed five neural rights: mental privacy, personal identity, free will, protection from bias, and equitable access to cognitive enhancement prompting U.S. senate to admit Management of Individuals’ Neural Data Act of 2025 (MIND Act), to prevent powerful tech conglomerates from collecting, selling and combining brain data in ways that could manipulate users’ decisions, emotions, or purchases. Chile was possibly the first country in the world to unanimously approve a constitutional amendment protecting mental integrity in 2021 closely followed by Spain.
India at the crossroads
India built its first indigenous digital computer at TIFR in Mumbai, with the pilot machine operational by 1956 and the full TIFRAC commissioned in 1960. India did not miss computing intellectually. It missed the hardware and product layer — crushed by the License Raj and import restrictions. When liberalisation came in 1991, that manufacturing window had closed. What India caught was the services layer. Brilliant engineers became execution experts rather than inventors. For intent-based computing, the question is whether India will again populate someone else’s abstraction rather than build its own.
India’s current BCI ecosystem is real but nascent. IIT Kanpur has built a BCI-controlled robotic hand. IIT Kharagpur has developed hands-free text-entry systems for people with disabilities. IIT Palakkad’s BCI lab is working on EEG-based driver-drowsiness detection. The National Brain Research Centre at Manesar conducts fundamental neuroscience research. C-DAC has built Vivan-BCI for children with special needs. BrainSight AI is developing neurological mapping tools. None of this is at Neuralink’s scale. All of it is a foundation, if it is supported.
The legal infrastructure is missing. Section 3(k) of the Patents Act, 1970, excludes algorithms per se, meaning BCI software-dependent inventions face rejection in Indian patent offices while identical innovations are patented freely abroad. Section 3(i) excludes methods of treatment, creating a further barrier for BCI medical devices. The DPDP Act 2023 does not cover neural data. Indian labour law does not contemplate employers monitoring employee attention via BCI. This structural disadvantage compounds daily as patent filings accumulate elsewhere.
Five actions are tractable within this planning cycle: a National Neurotechnology Mission coordinating IITs, NBRC, AIIMS, and ISRO; a targeted carve-out in Section 3(k) for neurotechnology patents; an explicit DPDP amendment classifying neural data as a special category; a national initiative to build low-cost EEG devices for Indian classrooms and rehabilitation centres; and a standing Neurorights Council to guide regulation before a crisis forces reactive legislation.
Why this matters now
The mouse-brain drone that flew in Anduril’s AI Grand Prix represents far more than a clever stunt—it’s a prototype of questions civilisation hasn’t fully grappled with: if biological neural tissue can pilot a machine, and if human neural tissue can enable direct brain-to-brain communication, where exactly lies the boundary between a person and a computer? Between two people? Between thought and action, itself?
These aren’t science fiction dilemmas. They are urgent policy questions, education imperatives, and economic realities that demand public deliberation now—before neurotechnology advances beyond the point where meaningful governance is possible.
India brings unique depth to this moment. The Nyaya school mapped epistemology and knowledge formation. Advaita Vedanta probed the essence of consciousness. Yoga developed sophisticated attention models’ centuries before neuroscience had tools to measure them. This heritage doesn’t automatically translate to patents, products, or policy. But it affirms that India has long taken the mind seriously—an instinct perfectly suited to shape what comes next.
The brain is becoming the interface. That conversation belongs to all of us, and for India, it should begin today.
(The author is an Energy and Emerging Technologies expert.)
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