  We explore Sakharov's seminal idea that gravitational dynamics is induced by
the quantum corrections from the matter sector. This was the starting point of
the view that gravity has an emergent origin, which soon gained impetus due to
the advent of black hole thermodynamics. In the generalized framework of
Riemann--Cartan spacetime with both curvature and torsion, the induced
gravitational action is obtained for free nonminimally coupled scalar and Dirac
fields. For a realistic matter content, the induced Newton constant is obtained
to be of the magnitude of the ultraviolet cutoff, which implies that the cutoff
is of the order of the Planck mass. Finally, we conjecture that the action for
any gauge theory of gravity at low energies can be induced by Sakharov's
mechanism. This is explicitly shown by obtaining the Poincar\'e gauge theory of
gravity.
