Every few years, the global economy delivers the same reminder. A conflict flares up somewhere far away. A shipping lane gets contested. A chip fab in another country cuts an allocation. And Indian businesses that spent two decades outsourcing their technology stack to the rest of the world rediscover, all over again, how little of it they actually control. We are living through one of those moments right now. Conflicts across West Asia have kept crude oil elevated, tariff uncertainty has hit our export earnings, and the rupee has weakened past the 90-mark against the dollar this year, a level it had never touched before. Every one of these pressures traces back to a common root: India still imports the technology it depends on to run its economy. And yet, our conversation on technology self-reliance has stayed narrowly fixed on factories. We talk about ‘Make in India’ for phones, defence hardware, and chips. We talk far less about the software, cloud platforms, and cybersecurity tools running inside those factories, our banks, hospitals, and government offices. That is a costly omission.
The price of borrowed technology
Semiconductors are the clearest evidence of our exposure. Despite years of policy effort, India still imports 90 to 95 percent of the chips it consumes. The government’s response has been serious: the recently expanded India Semiconductor Mission now carries an outlay of roughly Rs 1.25 lakh crore, nearly 65 percent larger than the original mission launched in 2021. That is a solid down payment on hardware self-reliance.
But hardware is only one layer of the stack. Every rupee an Indian bank, hospital, or manufacturer spends on a foreign-owned cloud subscription, a foreign cybersecurity suite, or a foreign-licensed enterprise application platform is a rupee that leaves the country, not once, but every renewal cycle, indefinitely. That is precisely the kind of structural, recurring outflow that a weakening currency makes more expensive by the month.
When the rupee slides, the same dollar-denominated subscription costs more in rupee terms without a single unit of extra value changing hands. Multiply that across thousands of enterprises that renew their software licenses every year, and you have a foreign exchange drain hiding inside operating budgets that would never think of themselves as import-dependent.
Self-reliance is economic strategy, not a technology checkbox
The instinct in a volatile year is to manage risk. Hedge the currency, diversify suppliers, build buffer stock. These are useful, but they treat dependence as fixed and try to insure around it. That is the wrong frame. The more durable response to global uncertainty is to reduce how much of our technology bill needs to leave the country at all. To be clear, this is not a nostalgic or protectionist argument. It is a financial one. Every time an Indian business chooses a domestic software technology provider over a foreign one, provided the Indian solution is genuinely comparable or superior, it keeps that spending, the associated margins, and the technical expertise inside the Indian economy, where they can compound.
It funds the next round of local R&D, the next set of local engineering jobs, and the next Indian product that can eventually compete abroad and bring foreign exchange in, rather than send it out. Treated at scale, it becomes an economic policy, executed one procurement decision at a time.
Beyond fabs and factories
Some Indian founders have spent the better part of two decades building and scaling software companies like Zoho out of India. They compete daily with some of the world’s largest software vendors such as Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft, and Google, in categories they consider their home turf. That experience convinces us of something simple. India does not lack the engineering talent, the capital, or the ambition to build enterprise-grade software. What it has lacked is a domestic market willing to back Indian-built software before it is forced to.
Cybersecurity and data protection are a good test case. These are precisely the categories where dependence carries the highest strategic risk since they sit closest to an enterprise’s most sensitive data and its ability to recover from an attack. India has capable, globally competitive companies building in this space today. Yet many Indian enterprises still default to foreign platforms as the safe, unquestioned choice, often paying a currency-inflated premium for capability that domestic providers now exceed. ‘Build in India, Buy in India’ cannot remain a manufacturing slogan. It has to extend to the software licenses, the cloud contracts, and the security stacks that businesses renew every single year, largely without scrutiny.
The mandate for business leaders
Every CIO and CFO reading this should ask a hard question at the next renewal cycle: does this vendor need to be foreign, or has it simply always been foreign? For undifferentiated, commodity software, and increasingly for specialised categories like cybersecurity and data protection, a capable Indian alternative is very likely already in the market. Choosing it is no longer a compromise on quality. Increasingly, it is the more resilient, more cost-predictable, and more patriotic choice, in that order.
Global uncertainty is not going away. Supply chains will keep getting tested, currencies will keep moving, and geopolitics will keep intruding on IT budgets. The solution is not simply to manage that external risk more cleverly. It is to build stronger domestic technology capability so that innovation, expertise, and economic value stay where they are created: in India.
This article has been written by Sekar Vembu, Founder and CEO, Vembu Technologies
