Over the past two decades, India has made extraordinary strides in bringing technology into the centre of national life. We have digitised government services, built payment infrastructure that the world has come to study and admire, placed smartphones in the hands of hundreds of millions of people and connected them to platforms, markets, and opportunities that were once unimaginable.

By almost every measure of digital adoption, India has done something remarkable. Yet much of the technology infrastructure that powers this transformation is not owned by India. Most businesses run on foreign platforms. Critical systems including government services, hospitals, banks, power grids, and supply chains flow through foreign clouds or rely on systems ultimately controlled outside our borders.

The question this raises is simple. What happens if that access is suddenly restricted?

In 2025, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court reportedly lost access to his email after a technology provider complied with government instructions. Around the same time, an Indian company, Nyara Energy, suddenly lost access to essential cloud tools. These were not cyber criminals breaking into systems. These were administrative decisions made by legitimate service providers.

For a nation as large and ambitious as India, being a mere consumer of technology is a risk we can no longer afford to take.

Ownership beyond just usage

However, when we talk about technology sovereignty, it is easy to get lost in the clouds. Sovereignty, in this context, means the ability to make consequential decisions about ones own digital infrastructure without being subject to another country’s veto. Broadly, it relates to control over critical digital assets along with the associated physical and intangible enablers such as human expertise and the governing regulatory framework.

It is equally important to understand what this is not. Technology sovereignty does not mean we stop using foreign innovations or that we try to build every single tiny component ourselves. Instead of viewing it as techno-isolation, it must be seen as having the intellectual property, the local talent, domestic capabilities and the legal authority to ensure our most critical systems like power grids, financial networks, and defence systems are resilient.

Lesson from abroad

India is not alone in facing this problem, and we are not starting from zero in thinking about how to solve it. Other countries have been grappling with the same questions, and their approaches offer us a useful map, even if none of them fits India’s situation perfectly.

The first approach is full ownership. China built its own versions of almost everything, its own search engines, social media platforms, payment systems, and increasingly its own chips and cloud infrastructure, supported by substantial state funding and strict limits on foreign players.

The US arrived at a similar outcome through an entirely different route. By producing private companies that the entire world came to rely on. The second approach is regulatory power. The European Union does not own global technology, but it shapes how global technology behaves within its borders and, increasingly, beyond. European data protection rules, competition regulations, and standards for artificial intelligence have become reference points that even American companies must follow to access European markets.

The third is strength through partnership. The Chip 4 arrangement between the US, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan around semiconductor supply chains is one example. As on date, India lacks foundational IP in most advanced technologies, has limited critical minerals and semiconductor capacity and, importantly, our bargaining power vis-à-vis jurisdictions of global big tech parent companies is weak.

Further, while our talent base is huge, depth in deep-tech areas is limited; building such expertise will take years.

India will need elements of all three global approaches to technology sovereignty.

Rather than choosing one model, India should adopt a layered strategy where different parts of the technology stack are addressed differently and the approach evolves over time. The most practical path combines domestic capability building, smart regulation, trusted global partnerships, and market driven innovation.

At the applications layer, including AI platforms and intelligent systems, India has a clear advantage. With its deep engineering talent and strong technology services ecosystem, the country can lead in developing and deploying large scale AI driven applications.

Control over foundation AI models will also matter in the long run. India is still early in this space, which calls for selective strategic bets supported by public investment and industry collaboration, while continuing to strengthen leadership in applications.

Data sovereignty requires a differentiated approach. Highly sensitive national security data must remain fully under Indian jurisdiction. Sensitive personal data should remain subject to Indian regulatory oversight. For other categories of data, strong regulatory safeguards may be sufficient.

In areas such as advanced computing and semiconductors, full domestic capability will take time. In the near term, supply security through trusted global partnerships will be essential, while India strengthens parts of the ecosystem such as data centres through market driven investment.

Finally, two foundations are non-negotiable. Talent and regulation. A deep pool of skilled engineers and researchers, supported by clear and forward-looking policy, will ultimately determine India’s technological resilience and leadership.

From intent to implementation

Fragmented efforts, even if well-intentioned, are India’s biggest lacuna to the technology sovereignty.

The most important structural step India can take is to establish a National Technology Sovereignty Council, a permanent, functioning institution tasked with synergising disparate efforts and developing a technology sovereignty framework which defines short- and medium-term priorities, approach for each technology layer, and tracks progress against defined metrics.

Alongside this, the government must engage industry as a genuine partner rather than simply as a regulated sector. Policymakers must evangelise the business case for sovereignty aligned investments beyond compliance, facilitate technology transfer from global majors, and catalyse collaborative R&D in sovereignty aligned areas through industry consortia and shared labs. Technology sovereignty is not a project for the long term. The decisions made in the next three to five years will determine what options India has in the decade after that.

The writer is President, Nasscom

Published on May 1, 2026