By Srinath Sridharan, Policy researcher and corporate advisor
Industrial policy has returned to the centre of global strategy, but the factories of this age rarely announce themselves. They hum quietly in data centres, automated warehouses, and high-performance compute clusters—places where the assembly line has become a line of code. The question is not whether automation will come, but whether societies can redesign work, education, and enterprise fast enough to keep their people central to the story of progress.
For a populous country like India, with its vast and youthful workforce, this demands a rethinking, or even thinking, of what the industries of the future will be, and what the future of industries must look like. Yet as the world’s most enthusiastic digital consumer, do we have an industrial policy for this invisible revolution?
We have been the global tech back office, even if we don’t like the phrase. We build the rails, but others own the trains. The result is a familiar national paradox-a country that participates in every global technology or industrial wave but owns very little of the tide. If we look beyond Trump’s tariffs, tech sanctions, and the swagger of Big Tech supremacy, a deeper truth emerges-the world is already at war for digital dominance.
In this era, industrial policy must be oriented towards the creation of sovereign digital infrastructure. Power in the new economy will belong to those who control the full digital value chain-not just production, but the standards, protocols, and intellectual property that govern it. India’s industrial policy must treat these as strategic assets and build digital foundations that cannot be switched off by someone else’s policy, sanction, or politics. Without urgent and deep investments in education, research, and re-skilling, India will remain a consumer of innovation, rather than its creator. To own the digital century, we must build both the chip and the thinker.
Across the world, the industrial revival has been both strategic and opportunistic. The US is reshoring semiconductor capacity through massive public investment and export controls. It is pushing for domestic manufacturing resilience. Europe is framing its “digital sovereignty” agenda around control of data and platforms. China’s Made in China 2025 strategy has produced champions across artificial intelligence (AI), telecom, and advanced manufacturing.
India’s approach, by contrast, has been piecemeal. While we have built extraordinary digital public infrastructure—Aadhaar, United Payments Interface, DigiLocker—the underlying techno-economic architecture remains fragile. Start-ups depend on foreign capital, servers sit on global clouds, and compute devices are imported. When the platforms that power our economy are governed elsewhere, our sovereignty becomes conditional.
India’s current industrial framework must evolve from the vocabulary of sectors and subsidies to the language of systems and sovereignty. The ambition is evident, but the next step must be coherence—connecting manufacturing with data infrastructure, technology with governance, and innovation with institutional design. The opportunity before India is to cultivate capability—investing in research, semiconductors, ethical AI, and resilient cities that make every inflow self-reinforcing.
Industrial policy must serve as a national risk insurance—protecting the republic from digital dependencies that could cripple its economy or compromise its security. The pandemic showed that supply chains can vanish overnight; the next shock will be digital. A single cyberattack or export restriction can freeze entire sectors. A mature industrial strategy, therefore, must build redundancy, indigenous capability, and strategic reserves for compute, chips, and data. The next asymmetry India must confront is data colonialism. Every click, image, and payment fuels algorithms trained elsewhere. Data extracted from Indian citizens has become a free raw material for the world’s most valuable companies, while India imports the intelligence built on it. Industrial policy must correct this imbalance.
A modern industrial policy must begin with a new premise: it must build ecosystems that are self-sustaining—cities capable of raising their own capital, universities that can retain and grow their best minds, and institutions resilient enough to absorb shocks. Such a framework would see data as public infrastructure, AI as a strategic asset, and digital ethics as the new environmental discipline.
This demands a cultural shift in governance. India’s bureaucracy remains optimised for supervision rather than creativity. Industrial policy must redesign its incentive architecture—rewarding officials for building ecosystems, not merely enforcing compliance. The state must learn to think like a platform—agile, interoperable, and data-aware—if it is to govern a platform economy.
India’s industrial policy cannot remain a catalogue of incentives and production schemes. It must evolve into a doctrine—a deliberate design that aligns national resources with national ambition. What made the Green and White Revolutions transformative was not subsidy but structure—an architecture of purpose, institutions, and urgency. The same is now needed for the digital century. Industrial strategy must weave together education reform, research excellence, fiscal autonomy, and trade diplomacy into a single playbook. Without such coherence, India risks building silos of progress without the spine of sovereignty.