TCS-Anthropic AI Deal Reveals Global Tech Colonialism: How Corporate AI Scaling Exacerbates Inequality in India and Beyond
Original framing: “India's TCS partners with Anthropic to drive enterprise AI scaling - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The deal echoes colonial-era resource extraction, where India’s raw materials (now data) are commodified by foreign corporations. Historical parallels include the British East India Company’s monopolization of Indian textiles and spices, now mirrored in AI’s monopolization of Indian data. Structural dependencies on foreign tech firms risk repeating neocolonial patterns, with long-term consequences for India’s technological autonomy.
The TCS-Anthropic deal exemplifies how global tech capitalism exploits India’s digital labor and data resources, echoing colonial-era extraction patterns.
By prioritizing proprietary AI models over public infrastructure, the partnership deepens structural inequalities and sidelines indigenous knowledge systems like *Jal, Jungle, Jameen* sovereignty. Historical parallels to the British East India Company’s monopolization of Indian resources underscore the deal’s neocolonial dimensions, while cross-cultural critiques from *Ubuntu* and *Dharma* frameworks reveal its spiritual and ethical vacuity. Marginalized voices—Dalit tech workers, Adivasi communities, and rural laborers—are excluded from this narrative, despite bearing its social costs. A systemic solution requires publicly-owned AI infrastructure, indigenous data sovereignty, and cooperative models that center communal well-being over corporate profit, ensuring that AI scaling serves India’s diverse populations rather than global tech elites.