India needs a digital sovereignty check: Thankfully, our infrastructure stack has given us a headstart

However, this idea that essential infrastructure must be owned and operated domestically is no longer unique to China. Across continents, governments are turning inward. The once-shared belief that global progress depends on collaboration is steadily being replaced by a more guarded instinct: self-preservation.

And this shift is not arriving with loud declarations. It is creeping in through quiet changes such as new regulations, tweaks in procurement rules and subtle shifts in funding priorities.

The trend is fuelled by sentiments of nationalism and populism. From Capitol Hill to European parliaments, leaders have the same refrain: protect what’s ours. Local jobs, local industries, local identity. The result is a protectionist reflex that prizes domestic reassurance over international resilience.

Trade protectionism, once thought to be a relic of the past, is back in style. In the last two years alone, G20 economies—many of them historic champions of open markets—have put in place over a thousand new trade barriers. Tariffs on tech products. Quotas on raw materials. Digital service taxes.

The US-China rivalry has exacerbated anxiety. What was once a race for economic leadership has become a contest of control. Export bans on semiconductors. Restrictions on joint research. Blacklists for AI companies. Oversight on foreign listings. Behind it all lies a simple fear: What happens when someone else controls your infrastructure?

Interestingly, India didn’t wait for this question to arise. Two decades ago, when few believed digital inclusion could work at scale, a handful of institutions quietly began designing systems meant not for a few million users, but for a billion. Aadhaar. PAN. NPS. DigiLocker. UPI.

These mega-scale platforms and solutions were built right here by Indian engineers, regulators and technocrats—often amid chaos, policy flux and patchy infrastructure. India developed what few countries possess: institutional expertise in managing citizen-scale digital repositories, balancing inclusion, privacy and trust.

Take Protean eGov Technologies, which has been building population-scale digital public infrastructure (DPI) for taxation, identity services and social security, creating platforms and repositories for PAN, NPS, TIN and CKYC that manage the identities and financial footprints of over a billion Indians.

Look at NPCI. Long before the West began debating digital payments, NPCI built an indigenous payments stack that is being studied from Lagos to London. UPI alone clocks over a billion transactions every day. It was designed from scratch for Indian conditions: low bandwidth, high population and deep inclusion.

RuPay broke a global credit card network duopoly; IMPS made money move in seconds long before Silicon Valley discovered real-time payments; AePS brought banking to the last mile using Aadhaar-enabled authentication. Look at the UIDAI, which built Aadhaar. Over 1.3 billion people can authenticate their identities within seconds.

Together, these institutions converted India’s scale from a liability to a strategic advantage. Here is a truth we rarely speak of: India’s most reliable shield in a volatile geopolitical world is not its foreign alliances or borrowed technology—it is the strength of our own homegrown institutions.

As the world becomes more transactional, India’s future will depend largely on its ability to remain functional in a fractured world. This requires ownership of foundational infrastructure. The question we must ask today is no longer whether we can build world-class systems. We already have. But do we own them? Can they survive if the world decides to unplug us?

That’s the new litmus test of sovereignty in the 21st century.

Digital sovereignty requires commitment to innovation, institution-building, scale, continuity and principle. That’s where the foundations built by India’s homegrown institutions shine. As geopolitical winds shift, these will be the difference between strategic autonomy and national anxiety. If India is to be a sovereign nation in the truest sense—politically, digitally, economically and institutionally—then our future must be built by our own hands.

The author is an investor and an Independent Director. He’s on X as @LloydMathias.