Making of a tech-sovereign India

Last year alone, India added 5 million developers to GitHub where this software sits. And by 2030 one in every three developers will be Indian. Why not deploy them to build Indian AI?

MUMBAI: Last week, Venkatesh Hariharan (Venky, as everyone knows him), India representative for the Open Innovation Network, and I ran into each other at a book launch. The book is on the ideas that have shaped India. With the benefit of hindsight, this was the perfect place to bump into Venky because the book traces India’s arc from 1870. We later sat down to discuss his most recent paper, which is part of a freely available book, ‘Strategic Priorities for India’.

Making of a tech-sovereign India

Venky’s chapter includes the stories of how India ran short of grain at one point and fuel at another. He dips into these histories to make the point that India must be self-sufficient in technology and artificial intelligence (AI) as well.

For more perspective, in 1965-66, India was starving and needed American wheat. President Lyndon Johnson made the shipments conditional on farm reforms. When Delhi pointed out that even the Pope and the UN Secretary-General had pleaded on India’s behalf, Johnson said, “The Pope and the [UN] Secretary-General do not need our wheat.”

This humiliation were the triggers that pushed India to create buffer stocks, build dams, fertiliser plants and research labs. ‘The Green Revolution’ followed. Then there was 1974, when India’s first nuclear test happened. A very upset world imposed sanctions.

The core of Venky’s argument is that the test has returned. And we have already had a preview. I wrote about it on these pages last year. On July 29, Microsoft pulled the plug on Nayara Energy, one of India’s largest oil companies, part owned by Rosneft. The European Union (EU) had updated its sanctions list, and Rosneft was still on it. Microsoft’s compliance team noticed and flipped the switch. Email, documents, meetings, records: gone.

Nayara found Rediff—an India veteran from the dotcom era. Not just that, overnight, the company also went to court. By July 30, a day before the hearing, Microsoft restored everything. Nayara withdrew the case. The shutdown was fast. But the restoration came only when challenged. That was tech.

This summer, AI went the same way. On June 12, a US export-control directive forced Anthropic to disable two of its newest models -- Fable 5 and Mythos 5 -- for every foreign national. India was among the hurt countries. Controls would be lifted only in July. But the point was made, again. India is vulnerable.

Stories such as this is why Venky sorts countries into three tiers:

Tier 1 has the full stack: hardware, software, cloud and skills. Only the US and

China qualify.

Tier 2 has a part of it: the European Union, India, some parts of Asia, Africa and South America.

Tier 3 countries have very little.

The money tells you why. In 2025, the US put about $471 billion into AI. China, about $119 billion. And India? about $11.1 billion. This includes the private and public sector.

The IndiaAI Mission sanctioned ₹10,300 crore, roughly $1.2 billion.

So, what does a Tier 2 country do? India has a history of climbing out of it. Think of India Stack and Aadhaar, which allowed India to build UPI. That is what allows payment systems such as Google Pay and PhonePe work seamlessly. This is acknowledged as among the most sophisticated in the world.

It did not happen overnight. It happened because India has a history of building open source software. “Building OSS communities is an act that requires sustained planning and effort,” Hariharan writes.

The economics are on its side. Venky’s research puts the supply-side value of widely used open source at $4.15 billion and the demand-side value at $8.8 trillion. Firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software without it. But over all else, India has the people to build it. Last year alone, India added 5 million developers to GitHub where this software sits. And by 2030 one in every three developers will be Indian. Why not deploy them to build Indian AI?

The idea has global resonance. “We will teach more mathematics, more engineering, because I don’t want to remain dependent on Chinese or American artificial intelligence. I want to create a Brazilian one,” the country’s president Lula da Silva said last week.

This brings me back to that book launch and our conversations. Venky’s essay is a paper in a book that is free to everyone. I asked him why. Turns out, that is part of the argument. Open source runs on one principle: knowledge is there for anyone to use.

And this one was written by people who know the subject. They are not just asking India to follow the principle. They followed it themselves.