India’s strategic moment for a homegrown “critical digital stack” is no longer academic—it is urgent, practical and already unfolding at pace across government, industry and the startup ecosystem. Recent calls from the Prime Minister and visible ministerial endorsements of Indian software, coupled with fast-moving geopolitical shocks and fresh policy initiatives, mean India must treat digital sovereignty as infrastructure policy rather than rhetoric.
The debate about digital sovereignty in India has moved from think‑tank papers to headlines and procurement halls. A clear trigger has been the international environment: punitive trade actions and tariff shocks from major economies, most recently U.S. tariff increases on many Indian exports, that have sharpened a national conversation about economic and technological independence. These geopolitical pressures are amplifying an already familiar domestic weakness — heavy dependence on foreign platforms for productivity, cloud, mapping, messaging and foundational AI services.
At the same time, India’s own capacity to design and scale world‑class digital infrastructure is now visible in successes such as UPI — a payments rail built at scale by NPCI that processes billions of transactions monthly — and more recent government efforts to empanel Indian cloud and AI infrastructure providers. These wins show the potential of a national, publicly interoperable digital stack when engineering, procurement and policy align.
Key components:
India should aim for pragmatic sovereignty: domestic control where the risk is highest; interoperability and collaboration where it accelerates innovation; and a developer‑friendly ecosystem that bridges Indian public digital infrastructure to global markets. The UPI story shows the payoff when engineering design, governance and scale align — the next challenge is to replicate that model across cloud, operating systems, language models and mission software, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of isolation and symbolic protectionism.
The alternative is continued strategic brittleness: a country rich in engineering talent and user scale, but exposed by concentration in a handful of foreign platforms. The choice is operational. The roadmap is visible. The political will is emerging. The technical work must now move from exhortation into disciplined, measurable engineering and procurement programs.
Source: The Hans India Critical digital stack made in India is need of the hour
Background / Overview
The debate about digital sovereignty in India has moved from think‑tank papers to headlines and procurement halls. A clear trigger has been the international environment: punitive trade actions and tariff shocks from major economies, most recently U.S. tariff increases on many Indian exports, that have sharpened a national conversation about economic and technological independence. These geopolitical pressures are amplifying an already familiar domestic weakness — heavy dependence on foreign platforms for productivity, cloud, mapping, messaging and foundational AI services. At the same time, India’s own capacity to design and scale world‑class digital infrastructure is now visible in successes such as UPI — a payments rail built at scale by NPCI that processes billions of transactions monthly — and more recent government efforts to empanel Indian cloud and AI infrastructure providers. These wins show the potential of a national, publicly interoperable digital stack when engineering, procurement and policy align.
Why the conversation has shifted: geopolitics meets technology
Geopolitical shocks are real and immediate
Economic statecraft increasingly uses tariffs, export controls and regulatory tools that can ripple through far‑flung supply chains. In 2025 the U.S. raised ad‑valorem duties on a large set of Indian goods — a move that has already affected exporters and prompted policy responses in New Delhi. That kind of shock is not merely a trade headline: it changes bargaining power, raises the economic cost of exposure to unilateral policy decisions, and forces governments to rethink resilience in critical systems.Digital dependency is a strategic vulnerability
India’s economy relies heavily on a handful of foreign technology platforms across multiple layers:- Consumer endpoints (Android / iOS, app ecosystems)
- Web platforms and browsers (dominant share for Chrome)
- Messaging and social platforms (global networks run by U.S. companies)
- Hyperscaler clouds (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
- Foundational AI models and toolchains hosted and developed abroad
Where India stands today: wins, gaps and momentum
A demonstrable win: UPI’s scale and architecture
UPI (Unified Payments Interface) is a rare case study of India building a global‑grade digital public good. It now handles tens of billions of transactions per quarter, with record months crossing well over 15–16 billion transactions, and daily volumes in the hundreds of millions. UPI demonstrates that India can develop, certify and scale interoperable, reliable infrastructure when the ecosystem incentives and governance structures are aligned. This success is not only technical — it is a blueprint for building other public digital rails.Domestic product momentum: Zoho, Arattai and ministerial endorsement
In an important symbolic and practical step, India’s Information Technology Minister switched his productivity workflows to a domestic productivity suite and publicly highlighted Zoho’s office tools. Zoho’s messaging app Arattai has seen rapid uptake after high‑profile endorsements and government attention, and ministers have actively joined the platform to signal political backing for indigenous alternatives. That kind of demand stimulus can accelerate adoption — but it does not remove the scale and feature gaps that incumbents have built over two decades.Indian OS and mobile stack: capabilities exist but not scale
The claim that India “doesn’t have its own operating system” deserves nuance. India has produced multiple indigenous OS projects and prototypes — from C‑DAC’s BOSS Linux to IIT‑Madras incubated BharOS, and collaborative industry efforts to ship devices running localized OS variants — yet none has displaced Android/iOS at scale in consumer markets. Pilots (including handset shipments using BharOS) and government use cases show capability; the gap is in mainstream consumer adoption, developer ecosystems, and a certified, interoperable app distribution and updates ecosystem at scale. India has the engineering talent and early products — but it lacks mass consumer traction and a robust app economy comparable to global mobile platforms.The new frontier: homegrown LLMs and language infrastructures
Contrary to claims that India lacks generative AI capacity, there is an accelerating corpus of Indian LLM efforts and language infrastructures. Government initiatives like BHASHINI and the India AI Mission are explicitly funding multilingual models and foundational AI projects; research groups and startups have released open models and task‑specialized LLMs tailored for Indic languages and low‑resource settings. These models are smaller or task‑focused relative to global megamodels but are increasingly production‑grade for critical local use cases. The priority now is to scale compute, data governance and quality assurance, and to connect these models into sovereign compute fabric.China as a comparator: what India can and should learn
China’s approach to “stack independence” has several instructive elements: coordinated industrial policy, aggressive investment in semiconductor fabrication and tooling, state‑backed app/ecosystem choices (HarmonyOS, Kylin/OpenKylin), and procurement levers that tilt demand toward domestic providers. The result is a materially different strategic posture: China enjoys locally dominant OS alternatives on a national scale for many segments and has developed a significant semiconductor ecosystem, even if it still lags in some advanced nodes. That example demonstrates scale, but also shows the political and economic tradeoffs of a state‑led path. India’s democratic market dynamics will require a hybrid model of market incentives, public procurement and open standards rather than wholesale replication of China’s model.What a credible Indian “critical digital stack” would look like
A pragmatic, defensible digital stack for India should be modular, auditable and interoperable — not monolithic or isolationist. It should emphasise resilience for high‑risk workloads (finance, telecom control, critical government services) while preserving openness for commerce and innovation.Key components:
- Sovereign cloud zones and certified Indian CSPs for Tier‑1 workloads (sovereign hosting, right‑to‑audit, local key control).
- Auditable OS and endpoint stacks for sensitive desktops and mobile devices (BharOS, BOSS, vetted Linux distributions).
- Open, multilingual LLMs and a national language data fabric (BHASHINI, AI4Bharat, BharatGen) with transparent model cards and evaluation.
- Indigenous identity and payment rails that interoperate with global counterparts (UPI as a template).
- A certified catalogue of secure industrial control and defence software with escrow, code audits and defined lifecycle support.
- Market incentives (public procurement quotas, grants, demand guarantees) to scale domestic SaaS, ID, collaboration and security vendors.
Practical steps India should prioritise now
- Inventory and risk classification (0–12 months)
- Mandate verified inventories of critical digital assets across central and state departments.
- Classify workloads by sensitivity tiers and require exit/interoperability contracts for key services.
- Ring‑fence Tier‑1 workloads (12–36 months)
- Require Tier‑1 financial, defence and emergency services to operate on certified sovereign infrastructure or audited open stacks.
- Pilot migrations for a finite set of high‑risk services (e.g., central payment clearing and national emergency communication).
- Scale sovereign cloud and compute (24–60 months)
- Expand on initiatives like MeghRaj and empanel private Indian CSPs under strict SLA and audit frameworks.
- Support GPU and model‑training capacity (including demand‑side funding) to reduce reliance on foreign model training infrastructure. Evidence shows market actors are already stepping in to supply GPU capacity under national missions.
- Build standards and procurement pathways for auditable software
- Adopt “open source first” procurement where feasible and require code escrow for mission software.
- Certify and accredit enterprise‑grade Indian productivity, identity and security software to drive predictable demand.
- Invest in people, education and developer ecosystems
- Upskill system reliability engineers, cloud security specialists and model‑ops talent through national skilling missions.
- Fund developer incentives to port and certify apps for domestic OSes and app stores to avoid a starved ecosystem problem.
Strengths India can leverage — and where reality bites
Strengths- Massive engineering talent pool and a mature IT services ecosystem that can be converted into product engineering.
- Large domestic market that can provide scale if procurement nudges align with product maturity.
- Successful examples of public digital rails (UPI, Aadhaar) show that interoperable national infrastructure can be world‑class.
- Hyperscalers have unmatched capex and decades of platform engineering; matching them across the full stack will be expensive and time‑consuming.
- Building consumer OS and app ecosystems requires not just engineering but developer incentives, global partnerships and distribution channels.
- Over‑reliance on procurement levers risks stunting product competitiveness; demand without product parity will not sustain adoption.
- Trade and diplomatic friction may escalate as India reduces certain dependencies; that is a political calculation, not a purely technical one.
What success looks like — measurable indicators
- Certified sovereign cloud capacity running Tier‑1 workloads with local keys and right‑to‑audit clauses.
- A thriving ecosystem of Indian SaaS vendors for productivity, collaboration and cybersecurity with credible enterprise SLA track records.
- A national multilingual LLM and language infrastructure powering public services with transparent evaluation metrics.
- Measurable reduction in single‑vendor exposure for critical services (email, identity, core banking) at central and state levels.
- Developer and consumer adoption metrics for indigenous OS/endpoint stacks (app numbers, verified installs, security certification pass rates).
Immediate policy cautions and technical caveats
- Do not equate sovereignty with isolation: interoperability and international cooperation remain essential for trade and innovation. Sovereignty should be risk‑reduction, not protectionism by default.
- Avoid “checkbox” procurement that mandates domestic suppliers without performance certification. Performance, security and interop are what win long‑term adoption.
- Transparency and auditability must accompany any deployment of indigenous stacks — closed proprietary domestically developed systems can recreate the same single‑vendor risks they are intended to remove.
- Some widely reported claims are simplified or time‑bound; for example, India’s AI and LLM ecosystem is active and producing models (BHASHINI, AI4Bharat, BharatGen and several startup models), even if global megamodel parity has not been achieved. These are growing capabilities, not an absence of effort.
Conclusion — a sober, engineering‑led push for digital sovereignty
The moment for a credible Indian critical digital stack is here because the geopolitical and economic incentives have converged with clear technical possibilities. India possesses the talent, the market, and nascent products to move beyond dependence on a handful of foreign platforms — but this will not be a policy switch or a PR campaign. It requires a multi‑year, well‑funded program that combines procurement, standards, public funding for infrastructure (sovereign cloud, GPUs), and clear procurement rules that reward performance and auditability.India should aim for pragmatic sovereignty: domestic control where the risk is highest; interoperability and collaboration where it accelerates innovation; and a developer‑friendly ecosystem that bridges Indian public digital infrastructure to global markets. The UPI story shows the payoff when engineering design, governance and scale align — the next challenge is to replicate that model across cloud, operating systems, language models and mission software, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of isolation and symbolic protectionism.
The alternative is continued strategic brittleness: a country rich in engineering talent and user scale, but exposed by concentration in a handful of foreign platforms. The choice is operational. The roadmap is visible. The political will is emerging. The technical work must now move from exhortation into disciplined, measurable engineering and procurement programs.
Source: The Hans India Critical digital stack made in India is need of the hour
