By Amit Kapoor, Chair, Institute for Competitiveness; X: @kautiliya
A farmer once asked a consultant how to increase milk production. After months of analysis and a hefty bill, the consultant’s answer was:“Assume a spherical cow.” This old punchline endures because it captures something essential about the consulting industry and its tendency to apply elegant abstractions to messy realities, often at great expense and with little practical value. For decades, global consulting giants have prospered on this dynamic by selling advice and models that dazzle on paper but falter in practice. As India now talks of creating its own “Big Four”, the challenge is not just to build large firms but also to write a new playbook that is grounded in local realities rather than spherical assumptions.
By the mid-1990s, management consulting had already exploded into a $40-billion industry employing more than 100,000 people worldwide. By 2021, estimates placed the market between $700 billion and $900 billion, with the Big Four sitting atop a pyramid of influence from Wall Street boardrooms to the offices of federal ministries. They are no longer just advisors; they are actors, shaping regulations, steering public projects, and embedding themselves so deeply in government that their withdrawal often feels impossible. This extraordinary scale explains why India’s ambition to create its own Big Four cannot be approached casually. To replicate the model is to risk importing its flaws which scholars like Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington have laid bare—an industry that profits by stripping state capacity, aiding dependency, and entrenching the belief that expertise resides only in the hands of outsiders.
The importance of local knowledge creation lies at the heart of this debate. Consulting, at its best, is not just about providing solutions but about interpreting institutions, contexts, and tacit realities. Imported models rarely capture India’s layered federalism, vast informal economy, or bureaucratic complexities. France’s disastrous Covid-19 vaccine roll-out that was strategised by consultants who transplanted frameworks from unrelated industries clearly showed how costly external reliance can be. In contrast, Kerala’s Covid-19 success drew on institutional memory from floods and past outbreaks, demonstrating the power of accumulated local knowledge.
If India is to avoid dependence on spherical-cow abstractions, it must embed consulting capacity that grows out of its own lived realities. Outsourcing significantly hinders the development of local expertise and infantilises civil services. To prevent this, India must build consultancies that strengthen rather than substitute domestic capacity. That means rethinking procurement and partnerships. Progressive procurement, as practiced in Preston, England, redirected contracts to local firms instead of multinationals, ensuring wealth and know-how circulated within the community. India could adapt this model, privileging home-grown firms so that contracts build national capability rather than drain it.
Equally critical is embedding learning into contracts. Too many consultancy projects end with glossy reports that leave clients no stronger than before. Contracts should mandate knowledge-sharing provisions and capacity-building milestones, so that each engagement leaves behind expertise rather than dependency. This shift would ensure that Indian consultancies act as accelerators of internal competence, not perpetual crutches.
Beyond private firms, India must foster partnerships with universities, research institutions, and public agencies. Unlike profit-driven consultancies, these actors are mandated to generate knowledge for the public good. Directing resources their way could expand India’s advisory ecosystem, strengthen public sector research, and create networks of expertise comparable to the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Such knowledge ecosystems, built around collaboration rather than market fixes, would allow India to combine its formidable technological and intellectual base with new forms of advisory capacity.
This is not to say that firm size does not matter. Just as India’s information technology services sector evolved from back-office work into a global powerhouse, Indian consultancies can aspire not just to protect sovereignty but also to export models. The world is already studying India’s digital stack, fintech regulation, and frugal innovation. An Indian Big Four could become ambassadors of these practices, shaping governance in emerging markets, much as McKinsey once shaped corporations in the West.
In addition to scale, strategic advice sovereignty also becomes critical. In strategic domains such as defence, critical minerals, and digital infrastructure, advisory sovereignty is as vital as energy or food security. Several countries across the world bar foreign firms from dominating its most sensitive decisions, because advice is power—it shapes priorities, allocates resources, and sets the direction of national development. The US bars foreign firms from federal contracts, and Saudi Arabia also protects advisory sovereignty.
Why should India provide free access everywhere when the world does not? To succeed, however, India must avoid confusing auditing with consulting. The two are fundamentally different: auditing is about compliance and credibility, while consulting is about strategy and vision. Blurring them, as the global Big Four have done, creates conflicts of interest and undermines trust. Nor should India settle for foreign “member firms” that operate under Indian names but remain structurally tied to global headquarters.
True sovereignty demands firms headquartered, governed, and intellectually rooted in India. The challenge is clear—will India create consultancies that are watch thieves, borrowing and repackaging foreign models, or watchmakers, crafting new timepieces for the world to emulate? The government’s call should not be seen as an invitation to replicate the Big Four. It should be seized as a chance to reinvent consultancy itself through sovereignty, local knowledge, progressive procurement, and knowledge ecosystems that amplify rather than erode domestic capacity. If India succeeds, it will not only create its own Big Four, but will write a new playbook for what consulting could and should be in the 21st century.