India’s Digital Future Has Seven Critical Dependencies. Can the Country Build Beyond Them?
A new BDIA assessment identifies seven foundational areas where India’s digital infrastructure remains dependent on foreign-proprietary technology — raising a larger question about control, resilience and India’s digital sovereignty.
The Bharath Digital Infrastructure Association (BDIA) has released an assessment of India’s digital infrastructure capability, examining 29 technology domains across the country’s digital stack.
Its conclusion is not that India is broadly dependent on foreign technology. Instead, the assessment identifies a much more specific challenge: seven foundational domains where India remains dependent on foreign-proprietary technologies and supply chains.
What makes the finding strategically important is where these dependencies sit. They are concentrated primarily in hardware and critical materials rather than software.
Digital sovereignty is increasingly becoming a question of control over foundational technology — not simply where data happens to be stored.
The Seven Dependencies India Cannot Ignore
BDIA’s assessment identifies seven areas that require long-term industrial attention. These are not simply software products that can be replaced through procurement changes. They represent foundational components of the infrastructure on which modern digital systems depend.
Semiconductor Fabrication & Tooling
Advanced semiconductor manufacturing depends on highly specialised fabrication technologies, equipment and supply chains that remain concentrated outside India.
Subsea Cable Manufacturing
India’s digital economy relies on international subsea connectivity, making domestic capability in critical cable infrastructure strategically significant.
Speciality Materials
Materials such as germanium can become strategic dependencies when they are essential to advanced digital and semiconductor technologies.
Enterprise Storage Media
Modern data centres depend on large-scale storage infrastructure, yet critical storage media manufacturing remains concentrated among global technology suppliers.
Advanced Compute & Memory Silicon
Indian companies can build complete server systems, but important CPU, GPU and memory components remain dependent on global semiconductor ecosystems.
Merchant Network Silicon
Switch and router ASICs form a critical layer of network infrastructure, with global suppliers holding a dominant position in this market.
Secure Cryptoprocessor Silicon
Security hardware at the root of trusted systems represents one of the most sensitive areas of technological dependency.
Sovereignty Is About Control, Not Just Data Location
One of the most important arguments in the assessment is that data localisation does not automatically create digital sovereignty.
A company can store data inside India while still depending on a foreign-controlled platform, foreign intellectual property, foreign update mechanisms or foreign cryptographic infrastructure.
BDIA therefore frames sovereignty around control. That includes questions such as who owns the technology, who controls the board, who controls source code and cryptographic key material, who determines software updates and whether the technology can continue operating during a commercial or geopolitical disruption.
India’s digital sovereignty challenge is shifting from simply building digital capabilities to ensuring that critical capabilities can scale, compete and remain under Indian control.
India Already Has More Indigenous Capability Than the Debate Suggests
The BDIA assessment does not portray India as technologically dependent across the board.
India has developed significant capabilities in optical fibre, telecommunications, cybersecurity products, data-centre hardware, digital public infrastructure and semiconductor design.
The country’s indigenous telecom stack, for example, involving C-DOT, Tejas Networks and TCS, has been deployed across approximately 97,000 BSNL sites, according to the assessment.
India is also developing a growing fabless semiconductor ecosystem, with more than 70 design-linked-incentive-supported firms and multiple commercial tape-outs cited in the assessment.
The Bigger Problem: Capability Does Not Always Become Market Share
India’s challenge is increasingly a market-realisation gap. Domestic companies may demonstrate technical capability but still struggle to achieve sufficient adoption, scale, competitiveness and long-term commercial strength.
Building technology is therefore only one part of the sovereignty equation. India also needs an ecosystem capable of buying, deploying, financing and scaling Indian technology.
The Cloud Question Shows Why Sovereignty Is Complicated
Cloud computing provides a particularly important example.
According to the BDIA assessment, foreign hyperscalers account for more than 90% of India’s cloud market, while the three largest foreign providers account for approximately 87% of the IaaS market.
This does not mean that cloud infrastructure is inherently insecure. The strategic issue is dependence.
If critical public or industrial workloads rely on infrastructure controlled by companies subject to foreign jurisdictions, India may face exposure that cannot be eliminated simply by requiring the data to remain physically within the country.
What Needs to Change?
- Make government procurement criteria more technology-neutral and brand-neutral.
- Assess technology-access risks before entering major foreign technology contracts.
- Strengthen screening of strategic technology acquisitions.
- Include portability and exit-assistance provisions in critical technology contracts.
- Audit cryptographic specifications used in government technology procurement.
- Develop a long-term national framework for AI sovereignty.
- Invest over the long term in the seven foundational dependency areas.
Procurement Could Decide Whether Indian Technology Scales
One of the assessment’s strongest policy arguments concerns government procurement.
Indian technology companies can struggle to compete when tenders include requirements such as excessive turnover thresholds, certifications tied to particular foreign cloud brands, qualifications based on specific private analyst publications or global deployment requirements.
Such requirements can unintentionally eliminate domestic alternatives before technical capability is even evaluated.
A more technology-neutral procurement framework could therefore play a major role in converting India’s demonstrated technical capabilities into real market adoption.
From Assembly to Foundational Technology
India has made significant progress in electronics manufacturing and digital services.
The next challenge is deeper.
The country needs to move from assembling and deploying technology towards mastering the foundational components on which that technology depends.
That means building capabilities not only in applications and platforms, but also in semiconductors, networking silicon, storage, secure hardware, advanced materials and other infrastructure layers.
The next phase of India’s digital transformation will be judged not only by how much technology the country deploys, but by how much of the underlying technology it can control and scale.
Why the Seven RED Domains Need a Decade-Long Strategy
The seven dependencies identified by BDIA cannot be solved simply by changing a government tender or encouraging an open-source alternative.
Advanced semiconductor manufacturing, network silicon, storage media and secure processors require specialised capital, engineering expertise, manufacturing ecosystems and sustained investment.
That is why the assessment calls for a long-term strategic capability programme covering these RED domains.
The objective should not be technological isolation. It should be building enough domestic capability and competitive alternatives to reduce strategic vulnerability.
Conclusion: Digital Sovereignty Must Become Industrial Capability
India’s digital transformation has already created capabilities that would have seemed ambitious a decade ago. The country has built major digital public infrastructure, developed indigenous telecom technologies, expanded cybersecurity capabilities and established a growing semiconductor design ecosystem.
But the next stage of digital sovereignty will be harder. It will require India to master the foundational layers beneath the applications and services that users see every day.
The seven dependencies identified by BDIA are therefore more than a list of technology gaps. They represent a strategic roadmap for where industrial policy, procurement reform, investment and domestic innovation may need to converge.
India’s objective should not be to eliminate every foreign technology from its digital economy. It should be to ensure that no critical layer leaves the country without a viable path to continuity, competition and control.
The future of India’s digital sovereignty will ultimately depend on one question: Can India move from being a major consumer and deployer of digital technology to becoming a master of the foundations on which that technology is built?
