India joins ‘Quantum Supremacy’ chase

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) is seeking to build a homegrown 50 Qubit ‘Quantum Computer’ in the next 4-5 years. With this, India has joined a select few countries that chase “Quantum Supremacy” with an INR 8,000-crore national mission that will include building solutions for quantum communications, storage and encryption. Some of the applications of this disruptive technology are to hack into any cyber security system in a matter of seconds, lessen the time-to-market of drug discovery to just two days, run tests on various demographic and gene profiles and run complex aircraft simulations within a matter of minutes.