Digital independence is the next step for the India story

Hindustan Times

5 hours ago

Yesterday we celebrated freedom. The speeches were stirring, indicating India's time had come. And yet, in the real world where our economy now lives, inside racks of servers, lines of code, and foreign-owned systems, the picture is less about sovereignty and more about how easily the rules can be changed on us. Illustration of social media concept
Two weeks in this space, I wrote about Microsoft pulling the plug on Nayara Energy. A decision taken in another country, quietly yanked control away from a major Indian company. No troops crossed borders. No sanctions were announced. Just a click somewhere far away, and the lights went out here.
If that sounded like an isolated incident, it wasn't.
In India's data centres, a friend in the software business pointed to a software from VMware that has been quietly running the show for years. It lets one physical server behave like many smaller ones, squeezing far more work out of the same machine. Operators bought it on perpetual licences. Pay once and run it as long as the hardware lived. Budgets were planned on that certainty. Then VMware got acquired. The new owner announced the old licences would no longer get support. From now on, you had to renew every year. The machines hadn't changed. The work hadn't changed. Only the rules had. 'It's like paying off on your house and being told one morning you now have to rent it from someone else,' said the aforementioned friend.
You can't move house. You can't build a new one overnight. You just start paying. These are the visible dependencies, the ones that show up as invoices, blocked accounts, higher bills. But there's a quieter layer that's harder to see. Artificial intelligence, now woven into banking, farming, retail, and governance, arrives with the cultural DNA of where it was built. On paper, the top AI models can speak in dozens of languages. In practice, they think in one. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's how systems are trained. The logic, the assumptions, the frames of reference are imported along with the code. And here's the kicker: India generates nearly 20 per cent of the world's data but has the capacity to store just three per cent. Imagine a dam filled to the brim but with a release pipe barely wide enough for a garden hose. The overflow is simply routed elsewhere. In tech speak, to servers we don't own.
None of this would matter if the global game was balanced. It isn't. Interdependence works only when both sides need each other equally. In our case, the dependency is often one-way. Tariffs on goods might sound irrelevant to IT, but they ripple outwards. Inflation rises, American clients trim budgets. In certain industries like textiles, gems and jewellery, orders from India are being shifted to Bangladesh and Vietnam to dodge duties. In tech, the shift is quieter: contracts are being rewritten, compliance costs are climbing, margins are getting squeezed.
Yet, on Independence Day, we tell ourselves the digital powerhouse story. But power is not the same as independence. Kavi Arasu, a colleague who has spent years thinking deeply about this, described this imbalance using the lens of Indian languages. Imagine if your education system taught you to speak a language fluently, but never to think in it. You'd always be translating in your head, bending your thoughts to fit someone else's grammar. You could function, even excel. But your mind would be living in borrowed space. That's what happens when your digital infrastructure, your data, and your tools are designed elsewhere. His point is, it's time we start building our infrastructure and tools to work on our data.
This is why the day after Independence Day matters. It's the day we remember that political freedom was just the first step. Economic liberalisation was another. Now we need digital sovereignty—the ability to keep working even if decisions in a faraway boardroom turn against us. That means storing far more of what we generate. Building AI that don't just speak Indian languages, but also thinks in them. These can negotiate contracts with the expectation that rules will change; and create back-ups for when the plug is pulled.
The next VMware-style shift or Microsoft-Nayara moment won't come with warning. And when it does, there won't be flag-hoisting ceremonies or speeches to rally us. Just the quiet sound of systems stopping, and the sudden knowledge that somewhere, far away, someone else just decided how free we really are. This is why it is time to get past the notion that Independence Day is a date. It is a discipline we apply in the digital world with the same seriousness that we use to guard borders. Else, we risk turning the 15th into mere theatre.