Opinion | Who Moved My Tech?

In 1992, soon after Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Manmohan Singh steered the national economy in a radically new direction, the All India Congress Committee held its plenary session in Tirupati. Rao, who was also then the Congress Party president, explained the shift by saying that the country had to strike a balance between individual and common good.

"Indeed there is no contradiction between the two. It is the virtue of democracy that it permits a variety of such pursuits and their fine-tuning from time to time," he said. The wily centrist that he was, Rao redefined self-reliance as the prudence to borrow as per the country's capacity to repay. And then slipped in his main agenda, "while we are redefining self-reliance, we are not abandoning the basic principle... There is no way for the Indian economy to remain insulated within its confines any longer. It has to integrate itself with the world economy. The two-way traffic of capital, manpower, technology, etc, have to be opened up. We have, therefore, to reorient our previous approach to foreign capital".

Rao did not make the shift willingly. It was forced by external factors, especially a balance of payments crisis that pushed the country to the edge of bankruptcy. He shrewdly used Indians' fear of indebtedness and the national indignity of pawning gold to present the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout and the accompanying reforms as fait accompli. Undeniably, the shift engineered by Rao and Singh vastly improved India's economic condition and propelled it to the status of a middle global power legitimately aspiring to transform into a superpower. But it also speaks to the difficulty in effecting change in a messy democracy as well as using crisis as an opportunity.

Those were simpler times; when leverage swung between consuming markets and producer bases following the basic laws of demand, supply, jobs and profits. Capital begot capital, yet the rules of the market, however flawed they might be, helped distribute the fruits to some extent. Economic growth driven by globalisation lifted all boats.

New Geography

That has changed 35 years later as the business of technology rewired the very logic of market behaviour, rewarding first movers and creation of dependencies more than even revenue and returns. The success of modern technology companies (read US Big Tech) depends on quick adoption, global dominance and the inevitable choicelessness. As Henry Ford once remarked about his company's bestseller, Model T, "any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it's black".

The aspiration for a multipolar world is constrained by the dominance of largely American systems of the technology 'substrate'. A recent Delhi Policy Group (DPG) paper by Lt Gen (retd) DS Hooda and military veteran turned academic Pavithran Rajan introduces the concept of a "substrate framework" comprising computational infrastructure, network architecture, information systems and regulatory controls, through which technological power flows. China is now challenging the US in all these domains.

This creates a dilemma for countries like India, which value their sovereignty and independence but also aspire for the global high table. In Narasimha Rao's book, self-reliance meant the capability to buy, if not develop, your own technology and products. That is not enough any more. The DPG paper argues that developing nations often find themselves caught between competing technological powers while lacking the resources to build indigenous alternatives.

"This creates what could be called the 'technological sovereignty trap'. Developing nations require access to advanced technologies to foster economic growth and effectively serve their people. However, this access often comes with dependencies that compromise their strategic autonomy," Hooda and Rajan write.

Never Waste a Crisis

In times of crises, underprepared countries end up willy-nilly framing defective policies and promoting half-baked indigenous technological systems. India has seen the power of thoughtfully investing time and resources in developing tech substrates. The Indian Financial Network, or INFINET, developed by the Reserve Bank of India in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, is a good example. That spawned the Unified Payments Interface, the world class digital payments backbone that seamlessly drives billions of transactions every day. On the flip side, shortage of governance and ethical myopia hold it back from productively using technology. Fintech adoption skyrocketed because of demonetisation, but governance risks and ethical inadequacies of the leading digital payments platform, Paytm, were eventually exposed by the Reserve Bank of India.

US President Donald Trump's arrival at the White House armed with a wrecking ball that he swings unsparingly at sovereign relations to constitutional norms has triggered global chaos and crises. In India, which is one of the worst sufferers at Trump's hands, the response has been a reiteration of self-reliance. Incidentally, it also gave a chance to the ruling BJP to appease its increasingly distant ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which swears by "swadeshi" as its policy mantra. As a result, the government has shifted its official email service to Tamil Nadu-based nationalist entrepreneur Sridhar Vembu's Zoho platform. To capitalise on the prevailing techno-nationalistic mood, the company also reupped its 2021 WhatsApp challenger, Arattai. While Zoho is a homegrown success story giving global tech titans a run for their money, it launching a communication app for mass usage without encryption exposes users to the risk of data leakage. "Trust me, bro" won't cut it as even the best of tech is vulnerable.

Technological robustness aside, the country's socioeconomic, political and legal systems are underprepared to handle eventualities for such big shifts. A privacy law was enacted a couple of years ago but is yet to go into force for want of subordinate rules and regulations. Legal experts point out several issues with the law itself.

Disruptive Tech

The sociological impact is even more critical. Government data shows that less than 9% Indian households own a computer but more than 95% reportedly own a mobile phone. The skewed device ownership indirectly points to high usage skills rather than tech knowledge. New artificial intelligence-enabled tools will almost certainly widen this gap.

As Derek Thompson, author of Abundance, points out, "The problem of the next 18 months isn't AI disemploying all workers, or students losing competition after competition to nonhuman agents. The problem is whether we will degrade our own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we can deskill ourselves." That is true of the sovereign too. It needs to skill itself in timely policymaking and robust governance.

(Dinesh Narayanan is a Delhi-based journalist and author of 'The RSS And The Making Of The Deep Nation'.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author