At a time when war rages in the Middle East, the concept of sovereignty is clearly under threat. However, in the digital age, not as clearly, the technological sovereignty of nations is also under threat. And that is what makes Pranjal Sharma’s latest book, “India Innovates: Technological Sovereignty in a Weaponized World”, a timely contribution to the technological discourse in India.
Sharma defines technological sovereignty as the review “the ability [of a nation] to access, control and weaponize critical technologies without necessarily owning them.” Other scholars have defined technological sovereignty as “sovereignty of governmental action, rather than (territorial) sovereignty over something.” The risks of losing technological sovereignty, Sharma warns, include economic exploitation, foreign control, manipulation of a country’s military hardware, undue influence of global corporations and other such vulnerabilities.
He explicitly urges everyone to take note of these “new realities” before it’s too late. Implicit in his exhortations are a hark back to the colonial era when countries like India didn’t realize the changing power equations and remapping of economic influence before it was too late.
Having made the case for urgently protecting technological sovereignty, Sharma delves into how countries might approach this national security imperative. He describes how China has “produced a semi-autarkic yet innovative digital economy that is largely self-sufficient” through a system that does not block external linkages, but controls the flows on China’s own terms. Sharma implicitly endorses the Chinese approach as an effective one at “advancing strategic autonomy across data, compute and platforms”.
By contrast, Sharma explains how India, much like many other developing countries, has followed a more open-gate model, allowing global Big Tech firms to dominate its digital ecosystem. However, the recent weaponization of these global digital platforms—from the SWIFT platform to Microsoft cancelling its services to Nayara Energy—has caused alarm bells to ring across the world, and not least, in India.
Sharma describes in great detail the various efforts therefore being made by India now to protect its technological sovereignty—from adopting its own natively built CRM and email platforms, incentivizing the revival of its shipbuilding industry, to taking back greater control of the country’s data and data infrastructure, among others. Different chapters of the book delve into India’s efforts to build capabilities in rare earth minerals, space and navigation technology, digital public infrastructure across sectors, AI, quantum and now increasingly defence and national security.
However, while Sharma does a useful job of providing us a macro view of the different initiatives underway in India to build its tech capabilities, he could have provided a deeper critique of the efforts underway, and his analysis of whether these efforts will succeed in the long-run. Given a whole host of nations are all today attempting to achieve technological sovereignty, setting the global context for these initiatives would have made the book stronger.
One would have also wanted Sharma to leverage his deep expertise in this field over decades to outline his assessment of India’s overall strategy. Is India getting its priorities or resource allocation right across all these initiatives? What are other alternative strategies that India could consider? Countries like Taiwan and Netherlands have, for example, built strong technological niches, instead of attempting to build capabilities across the entire tech stack. Both these countries today maintain a high level of tech autonomy as a result, as the entire world needs them. Could such a focused strategy be more effective for India also?
Moreover, Sharma maybe doesn’t give enough attention to solving for the external factors that impinge on countries’ efforts to build technological sovereignty. The current owners of tech will understandably want to prevent countries like India from emerging as serious tech competitors, especially after seeing China emerge as a credible rival in recent years. As researcher Dwaipayan Banerjee has argued in his book, “Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution”, India’s aspirations for technological sovereignty have often “collided” against the structures of global capitalism. So what could be ways in which India could overcome these persistent global structural obstacles? Sharma’s call to action would have been stronger with inclusion of examination of such deeper issues.
Sharma, on the whole, provides a timely, much-needed impetus for the national tech discourse in India to evaluate its strategic pathways to tech sovereignty. India ultimately faces some critical strategic choices in the technological domain today. These strategic choices in tech will determine whether India can achieve its stated goal of strategic autonomy in its broader foreign policy.
For students of economics, geopolitics and international relations but also for Indian policymakers, entrepreneurs and business leaders, this book will serve as an overview of not just the high stakes involved but the abundant emerging opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation in India.
Anirudh Suri is a venture capitalist, podcast host and author of ‘The Great Tech Game’ and a non-resident scholar at Carnegie India.
