Vendors of generative AI tools promise that an unimaginably different world is just around the corner, and that we must all rush toward this future or be cast down into darkness. Beyond the marketing pitch, however, lies a genuine risk to India’s economic self-determination. The founders of the Swadeshi movement saw a similar pattern at the dawn of the twentieth century, and their core insight still applies today.
For the past two decades, I have worked as a software engineer in the United States, in both the public and private sectors. Shortly before I began my career, the world of enterprise IT was undergoing a sea change: a wide range of industries were discovering that they could outsource IT operations to specialist firms, not only as individual projects, but on an ongoing basis by establishing long-lived partnerships. To this day, no other nation can compete with India’s “Big Six” technology firms in this domain.
The Anatomy of Dependency
As firms across the globe grew to depend on Indian IT service providers, I perceived two clear consequences. First was a structural disruption in the domestic job market for software engineers. This disruption disproportionately affected entry-level positions: why would a firm want to pay a market salary in exchange for an untried graduate who might or might not have paid attention in class, when instead they could pay a premium consulting rate and get seamless access to the collective skills and experience of a seasoned team of engineers?
This trend directly led to the second consequence: as foreign firms systematically eliminated their in-house engineering positions, their internal capacity to implement complex IT projects on their own began to atrophy. Over time, the outsourcing relationship transformed from a balanced partnership into an absolute operational dependency.
Now, I see this exact pattern repeating. Vendors of generative AI services promise that their tools will entirely eliminate the need for human programmers. Every engineer at a major technology firm should realize exactly how global clients will interpret this promise: they will immediately think of the massive savings they can realize by canceling their outsourcing contracts.
The Parallel of the Spinning Wheel
Here is the direct parallel with the Swadeshi movement. In primary school, I learned that Mahatma Gandhi urged Indians to learn how to use the charkha to spin cotton by hand and weave their own khadi. As a child, it never occurred to me to wonder why anyone would have to relearn a traditional village art—did they simply forget how to make cloth? Years later, I learned the historic cause: the British had deliberately dismantled the domestic textile industry in order to reduce India to a mere source of raw cotton for foreign mills and a captive market for foreign cloth.
Today, the IT “Big Six” are foundational cornerstones of India’s economy, much as the textile industry was before colonial intervention. So long as these digital firms maintain a healthy environment for software engineers to truly master their trade, they need not fear that external AI engines could endanger their ability to meet deliverables if a foreign-hosted tool faces a service interruption.
We must reflect deeply on the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
“I hold that we committed a crime against Indian humanity when we parted with the spinning wheel and sold the economic independence of India for a pottage of foreign cloth. And today, acted upon by inertia, we are repeating that crime.”
Do not repeat that crime. The path forward requires preserving the independent, deep-tech software engineering capacity of Indian technology firms as a sovereign asset.
The author is from: The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA & NXT Fellow 2026
