India’s computing history is punctuated by moments of possibility, each representing a road not taken. What began as a genuine struggle for technological sovereignty has mutated into its inverse: a technological nationalism that celebrates the very forms of dependence it once sought to overcome. Silicon Valley’s relationship with India epitomizes this transformation. It draws talent from India’s skilled labor pool and treats the country as a captive market for its products, cloaking this dependency in the noble language of digital progress.
India’s elite technocrats, in their single-minded search for technological solutions, did not recognize the depth of their own predicament. Their failure proved tragic in two profound ways. Firstly, their aspirations for technological sovereignty collided with the very structures of global capitalism they sought to escape, structures that proved far more adaptable and resilient than they had imagined. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, their technocratic vision missed the real requirements of genuine independence. By imagining that technological advancement alone could accelerate development while bypassing the need for deeper social transformation, they reproduced the very elite–mass divide that had characterized colonial rule, ensuring their project would always remain incomplete. In attempting to overcome dependency through purely technical means, they inadvertently created new forms of subordination.
The grand designs of the early technocratic class have mutated into an endless parade of technological solutions to social problems, each more grandiose than the last. Over the past decade, the Indian state has launched scheme after scheme promising to harness digital technology to overcome every conceivable social and political challenge. From Aadhaar’s universal biometric identification system to demonetization’s forced financialization, from smart cities to digital governance platforms — each initiative recycles the old technocratic promise of transformation while delivering new forms of dependent development and state capture.
In attempting to overcome dependency through purely technical means, they inadvertently created new forms of subordination.”
The “Make in India” initiative of 2014 stands as perhaps the clearest example of this farcical repetition. Launched with tremendous fanfare by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the program promised nothing less than India’s emergence as “the new factory of the world.” In its grandiloquent vision of India supplanting China in global manufacturing, the initiative precisely mimicked the industrial aspirations of the early post-independence era. Its architects set targets that could have been lifted directly from a 1950s five-year plan: 12–14% annual industrial growth, 100 million new manufacturing jobs by 2022, and an increase in manufacturing’s share to 25% of GDP. But where the original planners sought to build genuine industrial capabilities, Make in India offered only the hollow shell of industrial policy — tax incentives and marketing campaigns masquerading as a cohesive strategy.
A decade later, Make in India’s outcomes read as an epitaph for India’s industrial ambitions. The statistics tell the story of comprehensive collapse: manufacturing’s share of Gross Added Value plummeted to 14.7% in 2022–23, its lowest level since the darkest days of the so-called “Hindu rate of growth” in 1968–69. Far from creating new jobs, the sector hemorrhaged nearly a million workers between 2016–17 and 2022–23. The government, following a script written during liberalization in the 1980s, had placed its faith entirely in foreign direct investment (FDI). While FDI flows did indeed surge, rising from $36 billion to $85 billion annually by 2022, these impressive-looking numbers masked a darker reality. By 2020–21, out of $80 billion in foreign investment, barely $21 billion translated into actual manufacturing capability.
The decimation of domestic innovative capacity tells an even more damning story. Research and development (R&D) spending, the lifeblood of technological autonomy, withered from an already anemic 0.83% of GDP in 2009–10 to a skeletal 0.64% in 2020–21. The private sector, once imagined as the engine of technological development, retreated from R&D entirely, its share dropping from 45.2% to 40.8%. India is now among the few major economies that have public institutions account for more than half of domestic R&D expenditure — not because of strong state capacity, but because of private sector abdication. While India’s share of global R&D spending stagnated at 2.9%, China, following a dramatically different development path, surged to 22.8% by 2017, second only to the United States. These numbers represent not just policy failure but the collapse of a developmental vision.
A program named for self-reliance deepened import dependency, while an initiative intended to strengthen manufacturing ended up primarily supporting the service sector.”
The Modi government’s 2020 rebranding of Make in India into “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” (Self-Reliant India) only draws further attention to the farcical nature of technological nationalism today. Even as evidence of deepening dependency continued to mount, government ministers celebrated India’s supposed emergence as a manufacturing powerhouse. They trumpeted rising FDI numbers as proof of growing technological prowess, while carefully obscuring where this investment actually went. The reality was damning: nine sectors, dominated by IT services, absorbed the majority of FDI flows after 2017, while manufacturing — spread thinly across 53 sectors — received barely 30% of total foreign investment. Here was the ultimate irony: a program named for self-reliance deepened import dependency, while an initiative intended to strengthen manufacturing ended up primarily supporting the service sector.
Foreign investment flows and nationalist rhetoric mask deep inequalities when it comes to who benefits from technological change and who bears its costs. Once again, the severing of software expertise from hardware capabilities is the canary in the coal mine. While early computing initiatives at institutions like TIFR [Tata Institute of Fundamental Research] understood hardware development as the necessary foundation for genuine industrial growth, and while the Department of Electronics pursued a more strategic vision of leveraging software exports to build a hardware manufacturing base, today’s orthodoxy celebrates India’s supposed comparative advantage in software services while accepting permanent technological subordination in the hardware sector. This bifurcation has profound consequences. The absence of a cohesive ecosystem linking research, manufacturing, and service provision has precluded the emergence of the robust national innovation system that successful late-late industrializers managed to construct elsewhere.
The ramifications of this transformation extend far beyond India. Semiconductor fabrication, for example, remains overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of wealthy economies, limiting the Global South’s ability to control the production of essential computing hardware. Similarly, renewable energy transitions, dependent on minerals like lithium and copper disproportionately sourced from Africa and Latin America, often reproduce colonial patterns of extraction rather than supporting genuine local innovation. Even promising software innovation hubs, such as Lagos’s thriving startup ecosystem, remain at risk of becoming mere talent pools and captive markets for multinational corporations — replicating India’s downward trajectory of digital dependency.
As nations across the Global South seek technological autonomy, they confront not just the immense capital requirements of advanced manufacturing — measured in billions of dollars for a single semiconductor fabrication facility — but the persistent hierarchies first established under colonialism and maintained through continuously evolving mechanisms of economic control after independence. India’s experience reveals that successfully navigating global technology markets demands more than capital or skilled labor. It requires fundamentally different institutional arrangements and social relations than those that emerged from the postcolonial period — arrangements that have yet to be imagined, let alone implemented.
Yet the story need not end here. The moment of decolonization reminds us that other worlds were once possible — that technological development need not inevitably reproduce patterns of dependence. Any renewed struggle for technological sovereignty must begin by reclaiming the revolutionary promise of that first decolonial moment, while appreciating that genuine independence requires not just scientific expertise or state planning, but fundamental social and political transformation. Only by recognizing how the tragedy of failed decolonization gave way to the farce of contemporary technological nationalism can we begin to shape futures that break, at last, from this unrelenting cycle.
