India’s digital sovereignty gaps are concentrated in seven foundational hardware dependencies

India has developed significant indigenous capabilities across its digital infrastructure stack but remains dependent on foreign proprietary technologies at seven foundational points, according to a new assessment by the Bharath Digital Infrastructure Association (BDIA).

The report, Securing India’s Digital Foundations: A National Capability Assessment of Bharat’s Digital Infrastructure Stack and Sovereign Readiness, assesses 29 technology domains and argues that India’s digital sovereignty challenge is concentrated largely in hardware and materials rather than software.

Of the 29 domains assessed, the report identifies six where India has strong indigenous capability, 11 where Indian companies compete on foreign foundations and five where sovereign deployment is possible through open-source technologies. Seven domains, however, remain dependent on foreign proprietary supply.

These seven areas are specialty materials and chemistry, subsea cable systems, semiconductor fabrication and tooling, compute, memory and accelerator silicon, storage hardware and media, merchant network silicon, and root-of-trust and cryptographic silicon.

The assessment comes amid what BDIA describes as a series of technology and infrastructure exposures during 2025–26, including interruptions to critical technology services, the risks associated with abrupt AI technology cutoffs, concentration in cloud infrastructure, potential acquisition of emerging Indian capabilities and the use of foreign cryptographic specifications in government procurement.

“India’s digital sovereignty must move from principle to practice,” said Abhishek Bhatt, Secretary General, Bharath Digital Infrastructure Association. “True sovereignty requires shifting from downstream assembly to mastering the foundational layers of our technology stack.”

The report argues that sovereignty should not be viewed simply as the ability to deploy technology within India. Instead, it calls for greater attention to control, continuity and the ability to maintain critical infrastructure when access to foreign technologies or suppliers is disrupted.

BDIA identifies indigenous capabilities in areas including optical fibre manufacturing, 4G and 5G telecommunications, Digital Public Infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, data-centre hardware and semiconductor design. It also argues, however, that capability alone does not guarantee sovereignty, with market adoption, commercial scale and procurement conditions playing an important role in determining whether domestic technologies can become viable alternatives.

For the seven identified dependency areas, the association recommends a dedicated strategic capability programme with defined ownership, funding, timelines and industry partnerships over a five-to-15-year horizon.

The assessment proposes 14 recommendations spanning immediate, near-term and long-term interventions. These include defining sovereignty through control-based criteria in government procurement, establishing a National AI Sovereignty Framework, auditing cryptographic specifications in government RFPs and conducting technology-access risk assessments for new foreign AI contracts.

Other recommendations include brand-neutral procurement criteria, threshold-based screening of foreign investments in strategic technology acquisitions, and portability and exit-assistance provisions designed to reduce dependence on individual technology providers.

The report builds on the Bharat Digital Samvad, a national consultation convened by BDIA on May 20, 2026, with about 125 participants from government, industry, academia and the startup ecosystem. According to BDIA, the consultation concluded that digital sovereignty should be treated as an evolving journey rather than a binary condition, while claims of indigenous capability should be evaluated at the component level.

The assessment draws on primary product data from 12 BDIA member enterprises and Consocia Advisory, supplemented by secondary research using company filings, patent registries, regulatory certification databases and independent trade and academic publications.

BDIA said its approach does not seek to exclude foreign technology or close the Indian market. Instead, it calls for a resilient and globally competitive domestic ecosystem in which Indian technology capabilities are evaluated on evidence and are not unnecessarily disadvantaged by procurement conditions.

“The objective is not to exclude foreign technology,” the report’s approach suggests, but to ensure that India has sufficient control over the foundational technologies on which its digital infrastructure depends.