India’s Swadeshi Tech Push: Can Homegrown Start-Ups Take on Global Big Tech?

In the past few weeks, several Indian start-ups from different sectors have come into limelight for being a reliable alternative to a foreign Big Tech. From Zoho’s software suite seen as an alternative to Google and Microsoft’s tools to MapmyIndia’s MappIs app as an alternative to Google Maps, these start-ups have reignited conversations around India’s Swadeshi tech movement.

Swadeshi tech, an initiative launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Independence day refers to a deliberate policy and cultural push to favour indigenous technology, products and platforms over foreign alternatives. The goal of this initiative is to attain data-sovereignty and to build local industry and jobs.

Swadeshi Tech Movement

In the early 1900s, the Swadeshi Movement was a nationalist campaign in India that encouraged citizens to promote self-reliance by boycotting British goods and services and supporting locally made products and industries instead. The movement aimed to revive India’s indigenous economy, crafts, and enterprises, becoming a powerful symbol of the nation’s struggle for economic independence.

Today, the government seeks to address a more evolved version of that challenge through a new Swadeshi movement centered on the tech ecosystem.

India must strive for self-reliance in tech to attain digital sovereignty and data security, reduce dependence on foreign Big Tech, strengthen domestic industries, and enhance the global competitiveness of Indian start-ups.

Ankit Kumar, CEO & Founder, Skye Air Mobility believes that the swadeshi tech push will lead to domestic IP creation, which in turn will create more and better jobs and pump money in the market.

He said, “The Swadeshi tech movement enhances national resilience by reducing dependency on foreign chokepoints and ensuring business continuity amid global disruptions. It fuels an economic flywheel, where domestic IP creation leads to high-value jobs, reinvested profits, and stronger capital markets.”

Government’s Push

The government has used multiple levers to encourage “swadeshi” tech, through several schemes and initiatives.

Ankur Mittal, Co-founder of Inflection Point Ventures, applauded the various policy initiatives introduced by the government to support start-ups across sectors. He highlighted incentives such as tax breaks and grant-led schemes, noting that they have the potential to play a key role in accelerating the growth of domestic tech companies.

“We need the govt to remain a big supporter of the new age tech startups so that companies can emerge from tier 2 and 3 cities and at the same time large startup hubs continue to grow in terms of overall infra, better curriculum in colleges, pushing on innovation and capital support from the govt and the ecosystem, will ensure that our aspirations as a country are met,” Mittal added.

Through BSNL, and with key components provided by Indian firms such as Tejas Networks (for the Radio Access Network), C-DOT (for the core network), and TCS (for system integration), the government has commissioned over 97,000 mobile 4G towers. Of these, more than 92,600 use fully indigenised technology that can be upgraded to 5G.

The deployment of these indigenously built 4G towers, supported by an entirely Indian core and RAN stack, represents the country’s first credible achievement in both hardware and software for telecom independence.

Also, the announcement of a $1.15 billion “Fund of Funds” for start-ups, along with the removal of the Angel Tax, has provided a strong financial boost. These reforms addressed long-standing barriers that had previously constrained domestic innovation and foreign investment.

Sudhir Naidu, Founder and Director of Troop Messenger considers government policy as the foundation for the Swadeshi tech movement. He said, “While initiatives like Startup India, Make in India, and Digital India have created an ecosystem, the subsequent stage needs to focus on deep-tech innovation, IP democratization, and ease of doing business around regulatory frameworks. Concrete government policies like tax incentive schemes for R&D, data localisation laws, and public-private partnerships at the level of AI, semiconductor design, and cyber-security will be pivotal.”

Additionally, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act, 2023) and its associated rules have reshaped compliance guidelines for data processing and residency. This shift impacts foreign cloud and app providers while offering an advantage to domestic vendors that build solutions aligned with these regulations.

Homegrown vs Big Tech

In 2020, an Indian microblogging platform Koo was launched as a local-language alternative to Twitter (now X). It gained prominence during the farmers' protests when Indian politicians and officials migrated to Koo amid tensions with Twitter over content moderation.

However in July 2024, co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced the platform's closure, citing failed acquisition talks and a prolonged funding winter that hindered growth and operational sustainability.

The Koo app’s struggle to establish itself as an alternative to Twitter serves as a case study illustrating the challenges that tech start-ups face in breaking through in India.

On this, Kumar said, “Indian startups face several structural challenges when competing with global incumbents, including capital depth, trust, brand credibility, and talent retention. These can be mitigated through blended financing models that combine government, private, and revenue-linked funding, along with anchor procurement support.”

Top Swadeshi Contenders

India’s Swadeshi tech movement has found strong footing in recent years as homegrown start-ups emerge as credible alternatives to global Big Tech giants across sectors such as software, AI, mapping, communication, and fintech.

At the forefront of this transformation is Zoho Corporation, often seen as India’s answer to Microsoft and Google. Offering a full suite of productivity and enterprise applications, from email and CRM to cloud storage and analytics, Zoho now serves over 100 million users globally.

Its adoption by the Indian government has made it a powerful symbol of India’s technological self-reliance. Unlike many foreign rivals, Zoho runs entirely on its own data centers, ensuring local data storage, privacy, and cost efficiency.

Another important player in this ecosystem is Mappls (MapmyIndia), positioned as an alternative to Google Maps. With its fully indigenous mapping data and APIs for navigation, tracking, and analytics, Mappls has become the go-to platform for government agencies, EV companies, and logistics firms.

The company’s maps are integrated into the government’s Bharat Maps initiative and are being considered for use in smartphones under India’s Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. Its appeal lies in offering location data that is precise, secure, and compliant with India’s Geospatial Data Policy, something global platforms often struggle to guarantee.

In the communication space, Arattai, developed by Zoho, has emerged as a Swadeshi alternative to WhatsApp and Slack. The platform, whose name means “chat” in Tamil, offers secure personal and workplace messaging with end-to-end encryption and local data residency.

Meanwhile, India’s fintech success stories such as Paytm, PhonePe, and BharatPe have already outperformed many global peers like PayPal or Apple Pay in transaction volume and adoption. Powered by the government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which now processes over 12 billion transactions monthly, these platforms demonstrate how public-private collaboration can create digital solutions that are efficient, inclusive, and globally admired.

Inflection Point Ventures’ Mittal praised India’s skill quotient, stating that the country has led global Big Tech companies and is fully capable of building its own. He said, “Across leading global technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and Perplexity, Indians or leaders of Indian origin occupy top executive positions or hold significant roles in senior leadership. The talent clearly exists. If Indians can lead these companies abroad, there’s no reason Indian startups cannot build or match that scale at home.

Taken together, these start-ups represent a new phase of India’s technological self-reliance. Each of them, in its own domain, challenges the narrative that innovation must come from Silicon Valley or Shenzhen.