India-France Innovation Roadmap 2030 Framework
India and France have elevated their bilateral relationship to a "Special Global Strategic Partnership" and jointly inaugurated the India-France Year of Innovation 2026, leading to the adoption of the India-France Innovation Roadmap 2030. This framework guides collaborative efforts toward advancing co-development in critical and emerging technologies, strengthening trusted technology ecosystems, deepening academic and research mobility, and delivering concrete outcomes for shared prosperity.
Partnership for Trusted AI
The roadmap establishes 'Trusted AI' as a central pillar, building on the India-France Declaration on Artificial Intelligence of February 2025. Both countries will work together to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems aligned with democratic values and human rights, preventing discrimination and misinformation dissemination while supporting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They will encourage cooperation between regulators, standards bodies, and technical experts to advance interoperable, risk-based approaches to AI governance, including for frontier and generative models.
A key priority is cooperation on child safety online, recognizing the acute risks AI-enabled services pose to vulnerable sections, particularly children. Building on the Expert Engagement Group on AI and Child Safety convened at the AI Impact Summit 2026 and India's emerging techno-legal framework, the two sides will develop synergies between ongoing initiatives including privacy-preserving age assurance, safety-by-design architectures, and outcome-based safety standards for AI systems that interact with children.
The roadmap emphasizes the centrality of privacy-preserving data sharing frameworks, noting that India's Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) and France's work on trusted data spaces and health data platforms offer complementary strengths for secure, consent-based data flows for research, healthcare, and public services.
Academic Mobility and Recognition
Both sides acknowledge the importance of France's objective of welcoming 30,000 Indian students by 2030 and reaffirm their commitment to strengthening people-to-people ties. They intend to work towards an expanded and updated Mutual Recognition of Qualifications (MRQ) framework encompassing a broader range of academic disciplines, regulated professions, and emerging technology domains, building on the 2018 agreement that made France the first country to conclude an MRQ with India.
Industry-Academia Linkages and Technological Sovereignty
The roadmap recognizes closer collaboration between governments, industries, startups, universities, and research institutions as essential for fostering innovation-led growth and building resilient supply chains in strategic sectors. Key instruments include the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (CEFIPRA) with enhanced focus on innovation, the India-France Innovation Network (IFIN) as a key achievement of the Innovation Year, and the Franco-Indian Campus in Life Sciences for Health (FIC-LSH) for biomedical sciences cooperation.
Specific initiatives include the establishment of a Franco-Indian Campus for Aeronautics Training and Careers in Kanpur in partnership with MSDE, and the India-France InnoXchange Bridge as a bilateral startup and innovation exchange initiative providing structured reciprocal access to research laboratories, technology platforms, innovation clusters, investors, and startup ecosystems in both countries.
Space Cooperation and Global Challenges
Both countries remain committed to strengthening their space partnership at institutional and private ecosystem levels. India and France will host two international space events during the same week: the Bengaluru Space Expo (BSX) on 7-9 September in Bengaluru, and the International Space Summit on 9-10 September in Paris, contributing to deeper cooperation in Earth observation and human exploration including joint activities related to French Zero-G capabilities and Indian future space station in Low Earth Orbit.
For health challenges, building on ongoing collaborations such as the pilot project involving India's ICMR and France's Health Data Hub (HDH), both sides will work on consent-based architectures for secure data sharing that can be scaled, adapted to additional sectors, and shared with interested partners including in the Global South.
Academic Agreements
The annex includes 19 specific agreements between Indian and French institutions, including amendments to existing MOUs between IIT Bombay and Institut Polytechnique de Paris and Paris-Saclay university for cooperation in translation, incubation and acceleration; multiple innovation and entrepreneurship partnerships between IIT Delhi and French entities focusing on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change; strategic academia-industry partnership in Positioning, Navigation and Timing between IIT Tirupati and Safran Electronics & Defense; and numerous student exchange agreements between IIT Madras and various French universities including Université de Limoges, ESCP Business School, and CentraleSupélec Université Paris-Saclay.