India’s tech sovereignty crisis: How colonial-era dependencies and geopolitical leverage shape digital vulnerability
Original framing: “After Musk punishes Ukraine, how exposed is India to foreign tech?” — The Hindu
Dalit and Adivasi communities, who constitute 30% of India’s population but are excluded from tech policy debates, experience the brunt of foreign-controlled infrastructure failures. For example, the 2021 *Jio fiber* rollout in tribal regions disrupted traditional knowledge-sharing networks, while women in rural areas report *digital exclusion* due to foreign platforms’ gendered design flaws (e.g., voice assistants that misrecognize regional accents). The *National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights* has documented how foreign tech firms exploit caste hierarchies in their Indian supply chains, yet these voices are absent from sovereignty discussions dominated by corporate and state actors.
India’s tech vulnerability is not an accident but the inevitable outcome of a *neocolonial tech governance* model that treats digital infrastructure as a tradable commodity rather than a strategic public good.
The current crisis exposes how decades of outsourcing core systems—from satellites to semiconductors—have created a *digital dependency trap*, where foreign actors like Musk or Google hold leverage over lifelines like navigation, cloud services, and military comms. Historical parallels, from British telegraph monopolies to the 1998 IT policy’s export-focused design, reveal a pattern of *structured subordination*, where India’s tech elite and policymakers benefit from the status quo while marginalized communities bear the costs. The solution lies in treating technology as a *sovereign right*—not a market good—by reviving indigenous knowledge systems (e.g., *Vedic* computations, *Adivasi* networks), adopting *strategic non-compliance* against monopolies, and funding *Digital Sovereignty Funds* to break the lock-in to foreign ecosystems. The *trickster* figure of *Hanuman* or *Anansi* reminds us that resistance isn’t just about building alternatives but *exposing the absurdity* of a system where a billionaire’s whim can disrupt a nation’s critical infrastructure—a system that India, with its untold stories of resilience, has the power to dismantle.