India celebrated its hard-won political freedom on the 79th Independence Day, on August 15, 2025. But we must recognise that true independence today requires more than political autonomy. It also demands technological sovereignty, as technology aids every walk of life today.
Geopolitics has taken a darker turn recently. Modern wars are fought with software and drones, not bullets and bombs. The most damaging war is in cyberspace. Our banks, trains and power grids run on information and communication technology. A small number of companies, primarily from a single country, build and control these systems.
This dependence is a serious vulnerability. What happens if these companies turn off their cloud or Artificial Intelligence services under national diktat or out of malice? The capacity to inflict serious harm on the country is very real. We saw this when cloud services were stopped to a company recently. This is not a hypothetical threat, but a reality that we must confront.
Building the foundation
Technological autonomy is the solution. India has no operating system, database, or other foundational software that it builds and can trust completely. This leaves the country dependent on external sources that its cannot control or trust. However, the path to independence is not as difficult as it might seem.
The open-source model offers a path to a solution. India can create its own versions of Linux and Android that are safe and free of backdoors. It is possible for a dedicated group of professionals to do this. The real challenge lies in long-term support and maintenance. A large, supportive user base is necessary for a home-grown operating system (OS) to be viable. If we are to adopt an OS that is a little behind, we can make them competitive and viable. This is a mission for India’s sizeable technology community. The problem affects everyone, but the solution lies with IT professionals who build the digital world. They must join hands to remove this debilitating dependence. This is too big a task for any single institution, but is achievable if many unite behind this goal.
The path to hardware sovereignty
Achieving hardware sovereignty is a greater challenge than software sovereignty. Building sophisticated semi-conductor fabs requires massive, long-term national investment in chip design, manufacturing and supply chain management. Do we have the resources and, more importantly, the patience to build them? A crucial first step is to focus on specific hardware components and invest in partnerships to build expertise in chip design and assembly, even if fabrication is outsourced.
India’s journey to political independence was defined by non-violence. Its quest for technology independence should be through open-source software, which is a gift of society to itself. This is about supporting ourselves and not opposing others.
The global open-source movement is no longer the powerful socio-political force that it was. Much of the software today is open-source, including Android, Linux, and Hadoop. However, key control is with centralised cloud and data managed externally by powerful companies. A social movement for autonomy in software and hardware is needed today. India has the necessary talent and the capability. The way exists.
What India needs is the collective will. Let it start an urgent mission of planning, development, and execution before a crisis forces its hand.
Assembling a crack team to create India’s own versions of essential software from the open source resources is the first step. India must build client-side components (such as database, email client, calendar) and server-side components such as web server, email server, and cloud server. Open source versions are available for all of them. India needs to set up teams to continually update and maintain these components, which is the harder task. These teams should work like product teams in companies. This is possible only when there is a sound business model behind it, outside of government or private funds. The mission has to be self-supporting or better.
While this may have been a difficult idea to sell in the past, the current climate is different. Previously, only the strategic sectors were concerned with having trusted and secure software. Now, private companies and individuals are concerned about being dependent on outside forces for critical needs. People are already paying, either directly or indirectly, for the free and open-source software that they use. The shift to a model where these costs are explicit and support trusted software would be a small one.
A mission as the core
The immediate step is to establish a mission to plan the necessary actions. This will be an implementation mission and not a research and development mission aimed at academic/research communities. It will primarily involve strong development and support teams of engineers and a capable project management team to coordinate activities.
There is ample expertise in both industry and academia to make it happen, provided a viable model is established. The government will need to play an enabling role, but should focus on establishing a self-sustaining model as early as possible.
Let us embark on the long march toward technological independence.
P.J. Narayanan is Professor and former Director of IIIT Hyderabad, and a researcher in computer vision, computer graphics and parallel computing
Published – September 10, 2025 12:08 am IST