* True self-reliance depends on services, institutions and knowledge ecosystems not just goods
* India excels in financial services but lags in global control of IT infrastructure
* Strengthening research, higher education and indigenous platforms is critical for tech sovereignty
When India speaks of atmanirbharta or self-reliance, the national imagination often turns to factories buzzing with activity, indigenously manufactured smartphones, semiconductors and export-bound containers loaded with textiles, machinery or processed foods. But this narrow lens focusing predominantly on goods misses the bigger and arguably more critical picture. In the 21st century economy, true self-reliance hinges not just on what a country manufactures but on the services it controls, the institutions it builds and the knowledge ecosystems it fosters.
A Wake-Up Call from Nayara Energy
A recent and telling example emerged with Microsoft halting services to Nayara Energy, a large Indian oil refining and marketing company. Although Nayara operates entirely within Indian jurisdiction it found its digital backbone at the mercy of a unilateral decision made by a US-based cloud provider. No Indian law was broken. No local trigger was pulled. Yet key digital services were cut off overnight.
This incident is not isolated. It exposes India’s hidden vulnerability in the global services matrix. While India proudly showcases its global capability centres and burgeoning IT exports–from Bengaluru to Gurgaon–the hard truth is this: the foundational infrastructure, platforms and service providers that power modern enterprises are almost entirely foreign-owned. Contrast this with China, which has built its own cloud hyperscalers like Alibaba Cloud and Huawei Cloud, offering redundancy and resilience. The aim should be to have more options, not necessarily only domestic options.
India’s dependency extends far beyond cloud computing. Enterprise software, ERPs and AI development platforms–almost all are controlled by a small group of US-based mega corporations.
Technological sovereignty in goods and manufacturing is not going to be an easy task for India given the level at which the country will have to start, requiring many strategies including global partnerships.
But if there is something in which India can do well on these parameters it is the services sector. This is not an either-or debate between manufacturing or services. It is instead about focusing on India’s strengths, which can provide the most return on investment and a quicker path to sovereignty, at least in this sector and asymmetric options for India in general.
In the geopolitical arena, India has already seen how economic leverage can be used as a pressure tool. Adding to this asymmetry is the fact that the US runs a services trade surplus with India. This further underscores the extent to which our services infrastructure is controlled by corporations based in the US.
The lesson for India is clear. To withstand such pressures, we need economic resilience and diversified strengths in services and intellectual property. Owning strategic platforms, dominating niche services markets, and fostering indigenous research capabilities will give India the bargaining chips necessary to engage global powers on equal footing.
The Paradox of Indian Services
India is the world’s largest exporter of IT services. It is home to a massive talent base of engineers, data scientists, chartered accountants and finance professionals. Yet when it comes to global control and indigenous scale in these same sectors, India falls short.
India has the highest number of qualified chartered accountants in the world yet the Big Four– Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst & Young–dominate the market for audits, consulting and regulatory compliance. Paradoxically, India is the world’s back office but not its boardroom. It executes but rarely architects.
A counterexample lies in India’s financial services sector, which is perhaps the most indigenously developed and digitally advanced in the world.
Unlike in IT infrastructure or auditing, India’s banking, broking, insurance and payment ecosystems are dominated by homegrown champions. Our commercial banks are entirely Indian in ownership and control. Stock brokerages have built intuitive platforms that rival and often exceed their global counterparts in customer experience and innovation.
Our capital markets infrastructure is world-class, efficient and fully indigenous. Insurance companies are industry leaders. And our digital financial infrastructure is nothing short of revolutionary.
Consider Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a public digital payments backbone built and operated by the National Payments Corporation of India. In just a few years it has transformed the way India pays, becoming a benchmark for the world. With over 18bn monthly transactions and partnerships under way with countries such as Singapore, the UAE and France, UPI shows what Indian innovation can achieve with the right policy backing and public-private collaboration.
Similarly, RuPay, India’s answer to Visa and Mastercard, has broken foreign dominance in card payments and is now accepted in multiple countries abroad. This success proves a crucial point. When given institutional support, policy clarity and room to grow, Indian companies can compete and win globally in high-value, tech-driven services.
And to extend this success to areas like cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, biotech or R&D-led product innovation India must urgently strengthen its higher education and research ecosystem. Without this the services sector will remain execution heavy and innovation light.
A bold and feasible path could be to allow companies to direct corporate social responsibility funds toward establishing private research universities, drawing inspiration from the US land grant model. Institutions like MIT, Cornell and UC Berkeley were shaped through land grants and philanthropic endowments. Why can't India replicate this?
India also needs to reduce red tape and offer long-term funding mechanisms for blue-sky research. It needs dozens of new IISc and IIT level institutions, not just incremental upgrades to existing colleges.
India must redefine tech sovereignty for the modern economy. In today’s world, sovereignty does not rest solely on tanks or textile exports. It rests equally on who controls your data, your software stack, your payment rails and your ideas.
