Tech Sovereignity: The frontier yet to be won

Sujeet Mishra The trajectory from 1947 to Mars orbit is the trajectory of a country that set out to make things. At the 57th convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi on August 8, 2026, the Prime Minister gave a national ambition its phrase. Chip se lekar ship tak. It is only half the story.

COVID-19, a new disease, so nothing could be taken off the shelf. The pathogen had to be sequenced, a platform chosen and trials compressed into months. Rich countries bought doses before any vaccine existed. Everyone else joined a queue and accepted the terms, sometimes humiliating. India did not join it. Covaxin was developed at home. Covishield was made under licence at the Serum Institute, at a scale that let India supply others while supplying itself. India exported vaccines under Vaccine Maitri, because it owned the plant and the laboratory.

Then comes the part usually left out. On April 16, 2021, Adar Poonawalla of the Serum Institute publicly asked the American President to lift what he called an embargo on raw materials. It was not an embargo. America had applied priority ratings under its Defense Production Act, which put American orders at the front of a supplier’s queue. Nothing was banned. Nothing was stopped at the border. A queue had been reordered by administrative act, and the buyer at the back of it had nothing to point at. The ratings came off on June 4, 2021.

That is the argument in miniature. India’s dependency surface was not zero. It was small enough to manage. India never asked to be independent of the world. It owned enough of the value chain to carry the rest. Political independence was won in 1947. What the Prime Minister called for at IIT Delhi was self-reliance in three more arenas: economic, technological and industrial. The three are not independent of one another, and together they hold up the first. Technology is the deepest of them, because the other two run on top of it.

Software is a Controlled Item

Chips are designed with software called electronic design automation. Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens EDA hold most of that market, and no advanced chip is designed without one of them.

On May 23, 2025, America’s Bureau of Industry and Security imposed licence requirements on those three for sales to China. Synopsys withdrew its revenue forecast six days later, which is what a listed company does when it can no longer predict its own sales. On July 4, the bureau lifted the requirement.

Set that beside a lithography machine. Deny the machine and the denial is visible for years, in the shape of an empty fab floor. Deny the licence, and it is done by letter, undone six weeks later, with nothing crossing a border. In this case, the supplier and the customer were competitors in the geopolitical space, and India was not the target. The capability of denial exists; it is invisible, and it works by letter.

Friendship is Comfort, Not a Guarantee

Why did nobody count it? Because the supplier was a friend, and a dependence on a friend is priced at nothing without anyone deciding to price it. But a dependence that is safe under an alliance and unsafe without it was never safe.

That is no longer a theory. Europe sits inside a treaty alliance, has written the world’s strongest technology law, and is paying to leave the dependence anyway. Gartner forecasts on February 9, 2026, that European spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure would rise from 6.9 billion dollars in 2025 to 12.6 billion in 2026. On June 3, 2026, the European Commission proposed a Chips Act 2.0 and a Cloud and AI Development Act, the second of which would require European content in public purchases of cloud and computing.

An ally does not wait for a rupture to reprice a dependence. None of this requires an anti-American premise. Alliances change, and a capability outlives the intention that built it.

Democracy’s Second Requirement

Defending a border is a settled problem. The Armed Forces do it, and the police keep order inside it. Democracy has a second requirement, and no force is assigned to it. A vote is worth what the voter’s own thinking is worth. If that thinking is assembled from outside, the voter still queues, still presses the button, and the count is honest. But the choice was made elsewhere, before the queue formed.

A voter in Ballia reaches for her phone before her tea. In twenty minutes she saw sixty items, and she did not choose the order. A ranking function chose which sixty of six thousand reach her, and a product team in another country set that function, inside a company that answers to a Government which can compel it. She cannot see the rule, did not agree to it and cannot appeal against it. Nobody reviews it here, and it is not published.

Apology for Obliterating PM’s Video

In July 2026, a Facebook post by the Prime Minister was restricted by Meta’s own systems, then restored. On August 5, 2026, a Meta delegation met officials of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and apologised, calling the removal an operational error. Take the company at its word, because the point sharpens when you do. If an error can silence the Prime Minister of India on the platform most Indian voters use, the remedy available to this country was an apology at a meeting. Then the meeting produced something larger. Government sources say Meta’s representatives admitted that a lot of money had been paid to boost certain categories of content, and that illegal content had been promoted. That is not an allegation of favouritism. Reach is for sale, and the buyer is invisible to the person scrolling. Officials also told Meta that it cannot simply claim safe harbour under the Information Technology Act,  because its systems decide who receives what.

Whether feeds shift votes at scale is unsettled. What a feed does to one person is not. The Christchurch royal commission found YouTube a significant source of a lone gunman’s radicalisation. The Molly Russell inquest of 2022 found unrequested self-harm content contributed to a child’s death.

Capturing one person once took a human handler and months of labour. On August 4, 2026, the UK’s AI Security Institute reported software agents running their own reconnaissance, inventing identities and sustaining deception when challenged. That labour ceiling has collapsed. One agent per voter is now a budget line, not a fantasy.

The Guardrail

A ranking function stands for no election. Its owner is a private company built to harvest attention, and accountable to no Indian voter. A rule over it can come only from a body the voters can remove and the courts can examine. That is the argument for keeping this question inside a democracy rather than inside a product team abroad. Social media outgrew entertainment years ago. It is now the room where opinion forms, reach is for sale, and propaganda needs only a buyer. A citizen who dislikes the order in which the world is served to her should be able to leave, and to take her account, her contacts and her following to a home-grown platform with open interfaces. Portability is the part to write into law first. It is the only lever that reaches the ranking function without a Government touching the ranking.

Social media outgrew entertainment years ago. It is now the room where opinion forms, reach is for sale, and propaganda needs only a buyer. A citizen who dislikes the order in which the world is served to her should be able to leave, and to take her account, her contacts and her following to a home-grown platform with open interfaces

The number to manage is substitution time. If a supplier stopped serving India tomorrow, how many months until the country runs on something else? Six months is an inconvenience. Six years is a hostage. That number tells the Government where to spend first.

Two further suggestions, both for the Government, we need no new law. Count the exposure across the tax system, payments and banking, the power grid, railway signalling and the defence design offices. For each, the foreign software, the Government that can compel the supplier, and the months a replacement would take. Then buy for substitution, judging a bid on those months and not on where the vendor is registered. Europe has just proposed the same rule.

PM’s Message to Graduates

At the same convocation, the Prime Minister told the graduates that success goes to those who solve the problems the world has made peace with. India has already solved one such problem. The world had made peace with Visa and Mastercard. UPI, the payments layer of India Stack, runs on neither rail, and it brought the street vendor into the cashless economy. In July 2026, it carried 23.66 billion transactions worth Rs 29.88 lakh crore, and no foreign authority stands in that path.

What is Still to be Won

One difference holds the case up. Every five years, the voter in Ballia can throw a Government out. Nobody has ever given her a way to throw out the rule that decided what she read this morning. Portability is that missing ballot, and Parliament can write it into law. On our 80th Independence Day, that is the Independence still to be won. It completes the Prime Minister’s own phrase, chip se lekar ship tak.