The importance of tech sovereignty

Your water, electricity and broadband are all given by Indian service providers. Your roads are built by Indian contractors. The offline world is by and large Indian. When it came to the Indian mainstream media, the government tried its best to keep foreign players out of the equation. In the online world all that has changed. Tech has opened the floodgates. America has taken over.

WhatsApp is India’s largest player in that domain. Facebook is the largest Indian social media network. LinkedIn dominates social networking. Twitter, despite its small size, is India’s most powerful political tool. We are dependent on Google Maps and American GPS. YouTube and Instagram are big and TikTok was growing at a rapid pace before the ban on Chinese apps. Amazon India is becoming a behemoth and Flipkart has been taken over by Walmart. The world’s top three cloud service providers are American (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud).

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is showing the dangers of being dependent on America. Google Pay went offline in Russia. YouTube has blocked Sputnik and Russia Today in Europe. Silicon Valley can declare war on any country it wants to. What happens if it decides to go after the Indian leadership in the future over some political disagreement? China was the first country to realize this and has its own Internet ecosystem. The Indian ecosystem is by and large American, and this does not bode well for its future political and strategic stability. Indian IT services giants are heavily dependent on America for business.

It’s not all doom and gloom. India’s UPI (United Payments Interface) has 150 million users and is operational in multiple countries. They are developing a voice command feature in regional languages that is sure to make it even more widespread. The Digital Rupee is being looked at. We will have an operational Indian GPS—The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) or NavIC (NAVigation with Indian Constellation). The satellite launches have begun.

Indian Production Linked Incentive Schemes cover everything from semiconductors to electronics to hardware to telecom. The Indian startup industry really took off in the pandemic era and if this pace of growth continues then soon it will challenge the likes of America and China. This is not enough. Key remain the apps. India cannot hope to achieve much unless it becomes an app superpower. We have always been an underperformer in software innovation never having say a Windows or a Google Search. Not much has changed in the social media era. The largest social media platforms are American and Chinese, with some European entries.

This is one area where Make in India has to succeed. India’s future sovereignty may well depend on it.