India stands at a pivotal juncture in the global technological landscape. Our ambition to emerge as a superpower in the rapidly evolving era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—and to secure a place in the decisive race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—is not merely a technological or economic aspiration. It is, at its core, a profound quest for digital sovereignty, anchored in our civilisational ethos of Swadeshi (self-reliance) and Swaraj (self-rule). This vision is shaped by hard-earned strategic lessons from history, most notably the cautionary tale of our colonial past.

The British East India Company (EIC) began as a trading enterprise; within decades, it wielded political control, extracting immense wealth and dismantling indigenous governance structures. Sovereignty was eroded gradually—through small concessions, infrastructure dependencies, and legal entanglements. Today, a comparable threat—digital colonialism—is emerging, wherein a handful of global tech giants exert disproportionate control over the platforms, data, and AI models that will shape India’s economic future, cultural narratives, and strategic autonomy.

Lessons from the Past Shaping the Present

Five lessons from colonial India resonate with urgency today:

• Unchecked corporate power can undermine sovereignty. The suspension of Microsoft services to an Indian firm under foreign sanction shows how infrastructure dependence becomes a tool of coercion.
• Data drain mirrors resource extraction. India generates nearly 20% of global data, yet stores barely 10% locally. This outflow perpetuates reliance on externally built AI, often misaligned with Indian contexts.
• Loss of local capacity erodes agency. Low public R&D spending (~0.7% of GDP) and persistent brain drain undermine India’s ability to lead foundational AI innovation.
• Cognitive colonisation undermines identity. AI trained on non-Indian datasets often fails to reflect linguistic and cultural pluralism, reinforcing stereotypes rather than Indian perspectives.
• Strategic vulnerability in exports and supply chains. Our dependence on foreign GPUs and cloud services leaves India exposed to “digital blockades” in periods of geopolitical tension.

India’s Readiness: The Sovereignty Deficit

India’s response has begun—through programmes like the IndiaAI Mission, AIKosh, and Bhashini—but readiness remains uneven. We possess just 3% of global data centre capacity, operate at only a fraction of the compute scale of leading nations, and hold less than 1% of global AI patents. R&D investment remains shallow. These gaps are not abstract—they are practical limits on autonomy.

A Coherent Roadmap to Digital Swaraj

The strategic lessons drawn from the East India Company era make one reality unmistakably clear: sovereignty lost to dependency is rarely regained without decades of struggle. In the digital age, that dependency is not imposed through gunboats or revenue settlements, but through control of the very compute, data, and platforms on which modern economies run. The vulnerabilities are evident — the concentration of AI infrastructure abroad, the offshoring of our data, the erosion of indigenous capacity, and the risk of cultural displacement through foreign-trained models. Left unchecked, these patterns will harden into a new form of colonialism, subtler but equally constraining.

To break this cycle, India needs more than piecemeal policies or reactive investments; it requires a unifying framework that treats sovereignty as the organising principle of its AI and digital strategy. This is where the idea of Digital Swaraj emerges — an extension of the freedom struggle’s ethos of Swaraj into the 21st century’s most contested domain: the digital realm.

Digital Swaraj is not protectionism. It is strategic capacity-building — the deliberate creation of national capability in compute, data, governance, and talent, so that India’s technological trajectory is determined by its own values and interests. The following pillars must form the spine of a credible, time-bound national programme.

• Strengthen computing and chip autonomy: Scale GPU capacity, incentivise domestic tooling and fabrication, and reduce single-vendor exposure.
• Establish a National Data Commons: Expand AIKosh into a secure, consent-based repository to fuel responsible, Indian-context AI model development.
• Sovereign cloud & procurement rules: Establish sectoral hosting mandates for truly critical infrastructure, accredit sovereign cloud providers, and adopt multi-cloud procurement to avoid single-vendor lock-in.
• Model governance & openness: Require model cards, provenance, bias audits and licensing clarity. Incentivise auditable, open foundational models trained on Indian corpora to reduce cultural bias.
• Institutional architecture: Constitute a National Digital Sovereignty Commission and an independent IndiaAI Regulatory Board; empower state tech councils for regional deployment.
• Human capital & mission R&D: Fund fellowships, centres of excellence in AI safety and hardware, and return-of-talent schemes for frontier AI research.
• Diplomacy & coalitions: Lead a Global South AI Accord to shape export-control carve-outs, shared compute access mechanisms and fair licensing regimes.

These pillars cannot remain as abstract aspirations; they require anchoring in clear, enforceable frameworks that ensure continuity across political cycles and shield critical initiatives from policy drift. This is where the policy and institutional foundations must be explicit and robust.

The DPDP Act and sectoral regulations require targeted refinement: clear mandates for data localisation in critical sectors, legal clarity on IP and model training, mandatory AI impact assessments for high-impact public systems, and a simpler path for accredited sovereign-cloud procurement. Model governance should require provenance statements, public model cards, routine bias audits and auditable logging of decision pipelines.

To make oversight operational, India needs a minister-level National Digital Sovereignty Commission (coordinating MeitY, NITI Aayog, RBI, CERT-In and sector regulators) and an empowered, independent IndiaAI Regulatory Board with the authority to certify high-risk models, mandate remediations and maintain a public registry of government-used AI systems. State Tech Councils should be mandated to implement regional infrastructure and ensure federal–state coherence.

Technology investments must be synchronised with a short-to-long term plan. Practically, the immediate priority (0–12 months) is to secure bulk GPU capacity, accredit sovereign cloud providers and expand AIKosh into a federated National Data Commons with privacy-preserving access. The medium term (1–3 years) should focus on scaling domestic LLMs trained on curated Indian corpora, incentivising private hyperscalers to localise infrastructure, and launching mission-mode talent programmes (for example, Frontier Fellows and endowed chairs at central institutes). Over the long term (5+ years), India must aim for compute self-reliance — indigenous chip fabs, national GPU designs and district-edge AI nodes for public services.

Diplomacy must run in parallel: negotiate compute corridors with like-minded partners and lead a Global South AI Accord to secure fair access and shared standards. These practical steps translate policy intent into operational capacity, ensuring that India’s digital future is determined by its own strategic choices rather than external dependencies.

A Call to Immediate, Principled Action

The economic stakes are clear—AI could contribute nearly $1 trillion to India’s economy by 2035. Yet, our current compute capacity (148 petaflops) is dwarfed by that of global leaders (e.g., the US at 5,200 petaflops); our data infrastructure is modest despite contributing a fifth of global data; our innovation footprint through patents and R&D remains minimal.

It would be a historic misstep if India sleeps through this transition, allowing dependence to ossify under benign terms akin to colonial-era complacency. The prize is too large to defer: India must convert promise into power—urgently. A decisive, time-bound national programme for compute, data, and model sovereignty is no longer optional but an economic and strategic imperative; delay risks consigning India to perpetual dependency at enormous cost.

To become both author and architect of the global AI ecosystem, India must act swiftly, coherently, and strategically. Policymakers, industry, and academia must therefore move together now—secure bulk compute, operationalise a National Data Commons, and codify model governance—so that Digital Swaraj becomes not a slogan but the organising principle of India’s technological future. Only then can we transform the ethos of Swadeshi and Swaraj from heritage symbolism into operational sovereignty—building the data commons, securing compute sovereignty, safeguarding AI governance, and enabling the talent that will define India’s future.