PM Modi wants India-made services to replace Big Tech, Koo shows it won't be easy

India Today

4 hours ago

The moment is certainly right to make such a call. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi used it aptly. In his speech on Independence Day today, PM Modi issued a call for self-reliance in the technology sector. He highlighted that some of the steps are already underway. After many delays and a lot of buzz and talk, Made-In-India computer chips are finally happening. We are yet to see them roll out of their fabs — there are six in the country with four more in pipeline — but the Prime Minister on Friday said they would be out by the end of the year.advertisement'By the end of this year, semiconductor chips, made by the people in India, will hit the market.' PM Modi said in his speech.
The tech inside these six fabs is somewhat old — 28nm — but it is still a significant achievement because only a handful of countries have such silicon chip manufacturing facilities. And 28nm might not look all that jazzy in the era of 3nm chips, one of which is inside your iPhone, but don't forget that 28nm silicon chips will potentially give India more performance than what 95 per cent of appliances need. If you recall, 28nm chips used to be in computers in the early 2010s. Only top-end phones and computers need more. In other words, this is a fab-ulous news, worthy of celebration.But chips were just one part of the 'tech talk' from PM Modi in his speech. The other part was a call for self-reliance in every other tech sector, and particularly in tech products and services where Big Tech — Google, Meta, X aka Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft and others — dominate in our country. For example, in India, Google has a market share of above 90 per cent in search. In video streaming, YouTube is a colossus. Similarly, its browser Chrome leads the pack. On the other hand, Meta apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp dominate our lives.This obviously has several disadvantages and more so in this era of tariff wars, closing borders and increased focus on sovereignty and security. The global order is changing and Big Tech is in the middle of the power play because those who are reliant on it have a weaker hand at the table. The Prime Minister knows this well.'No one can deny the fact that the 21st century is technology-driven. Countries which excelled at technology reached the summit of development, their economic power reaching new heights,' PM Modi said in his speech. "Be it the creative world or social media, I urge all young people of the country to come forward to develop our own platform. Why should we be dependent on others? Why should India's wealth go overseas?"RIGHT IDEA, BIG CHALLENGESIn a world where Big Tech is fast turning into a bargaining chip — just look at how quickly a few days ago Microsoft cutoff an Indian oil refinery from its Azure servers — tech sovereignty is a worthy pursuit. Not just worthy, it might be necessary. The problem, however, is that India might not find it easy to create a Google or Microsoft alternative.The challenges on the ground are severe. There is a problem of retaining and helping the right talent which can build world-class tech products. Indians do so in the US, but for reasons, some obvious like red-tape, and some not so obvious, the same engineers and tech founders have not been able to build similar products in India. In fact, in product space our record so far has been abysmal.advertisementTake Koo, for example. Started as a clone of Twitter and promoted heavily, including by people part of the Indian government, the little yellow chick never managed to take a flight. After floundering for a few years, largely because of the product decisions that its team made, Koo shut down. If you go to its website now, you will be greeted by a message saying, 'Looks like this domain isn't connected to a website yet.'Similarly, there is the case of the Ping browser. Over a year ago the Indian government — and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav was part of it — announced a challenge, asking coding and engineering teams to create a Made-In-India web browser. The results came in a few months ago. The challenge was won by something called Ping browser, and the team behind it received Rs 75 lakh for winning it.advertisementBut as soon as Ping browser came out, a few enterprising folks went digging. Within hours, it turned out to be a 'scam', as one of these IT sleuths put it. The Ping browser was a copy of Brave browser, with its code modified to change the name. There is still a debate if it was indeed a scam or just some enterprising folks exploiting the lax rules that the IT ministry set for the competition. But the fact remains: in the name of the Made-In-India browser, someone passed a copy of a US-based browser to the Indian IT Ministry and walked away with Rs 75 lakh.Developing the kind of products that Big Tech makes can be managed only with resources, ingenuity and a regulatory environment that allows for the development of such services. Once a product is out there, it then needs scale in terms of technology. For example, even if an Indian company develops an email service better than Gmail, it is not going to have the necessary backend to service it to even 100 million people. Google, which does it, manages because the company designs its own servers and runs clusters that consume more power than electricity used by a small town.advertisementSo far, we have not seen any Indian tech company manage to gather and make use of all the ingredients that are needed to create something like YouTube or X aka Twitter in India. The Indian tech companies that have gained some prominence in product space are clones, such as Ola, Zomato and Flipkart. One exception to this is Zoho, which, in the enterprise segment, has managed to carve out a space for itself despite challenges from the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and Google.Having said that, nothing that is worth doing is easy. If something needs to be built, the challenges must be met and overcome. On this count, it is significant that the Prime Minister has given a clarion call. And now that a call has been given, Indian IT giants and startups must rise to the occasion even if the odds are stacked against them.- Ends