India’s Information Technology (IT) Services industry was a miracle of the 1990s. A fortuitous constellation of new tech and bold policies had created this wonder. The invention of the desktop internet was at the epicentre of this revolution. Shiny new private telecoms were laying cables and locking in global satellite connectivity. Technology institutes were spewing out hordes of young engineers who could write and operate digital code. Their cost was a tiny fraction of peers in Europe and America. Indian entrepreneurs latched on to the digital highways and wage arbitrage to erect the back-office of the world. It was a win-win game. The Westerners used cheap but highly skilled Indian workforce to expand profits. At home, giants like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, and a clutch of pioneers swelled their balance sheets by billions of dollars. In the wink of a decade, India had created a $200-billion-plus behemoth. The logical next step would have been to migrate to the front-office—to the higher rung of the digital value chain—to create innovative products and applications that could have competed with brands unleashed by the Microsofts, Adobes, SAPs, and Oracles of the world. That did not happen. But it ignited a raging debate: Did our policy makers throw the local guys’ product ambitions to the wolves by allowing easy entry to the global tech giants? Should we have had a restrictive policy, as in telecoms, insurance, banking, news broadcasting, civil aviation, and a host of other industries where foreign companies had to piggyback on joint ventures with domestic companies to access our markets? That compulsion created homegrown giants like Airtel, HDFC, TV18, Vistara, and hundreds of other native champions that operated with a cutting-edge global mindset. But a similar fetter was not put on the Mircosofts, Adobes, SAPs, and Oracles of the world. Did that crush the animal spirits of the IT Services cohort? Or...Did our local lads lack the bandwidth? Or the risk-taking chutzpah? Were they a tad complacent, enjoying their walled backroom, printing money but refusing to tread on uncertain terrain? At this stage, it’s a pointless debate, so we shall slink away from it. Except to note that India’s IT Services giants failed to create any global application or product worth the name.Chinese Dog, Indian Problem: Galgotias Chaos at AI Summit Reveals Deeper RotsIndia Watched as Alien Digital Platforms Took Over Civilisation Cut to the phenomenal noughties. Desktops abdicated to the mobile internet. Now the multi-media gadget in your hand connected you to billions of other human beings via text, sound, and video. It was an astonishing technological leap from the “lonely drudge” of the Desktop. Suddenly, the social media networks took wings. Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, and Twitter began amassing millions of followers. The coup de grace was delivered by Apple’s iPhone—amplified by cheaper clones from Korea and China. Millions rapidly scaled up to billions of followers. These platforms took over our lives. Twitter allowed you to tag the Prime Minister. On YouTube, you could upload the video of a cockroach in your airline meal, and the ambushed management would be at your feet. Your familial bonhomie moved from the annual vacation week to daily chatter and pictures on Facebook/Instagram.Unfortunately, India’s policy makers remained trapped in the headlights. China moved with alacrity to ban these platforms, incentivising reverse-engineered copycats to acquire monumental scale under a protective policy.Of course, an open, democratic, and globalising India could not have done that. But we could have put defendable guardrails and caveats. For instance, a platform giant should have been allowed to engage/co-opt our citizens only via one or more domestic joint ventures. After all, we had slapped a similar handcuff on analogous operations like telecoms and news broadcasting, so why not on digital platforms? That would have allowed a few local companies to acquire the skills and scale to create homegrown rivals—as happened in telecoms, banking, insurance, news broadcasting, civil aviation, and dozens of other industries. Unfortunately, that did not happen in the burgeoning digital platforms arena. So, India’s consumers became serfs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Some scattered Indian initiatives—like Koo—tried to take the battle to these titans, but bit the dust. The overwhelming “network effects” created by their unfettered, untrammelled entry into India allowed these platforms to maul any local competitor. In a column written several years ago, I had called it DACOITY—ie, Digital America & China Obliterating Indian Technologies. A hassled government called me for a meeting, but nothing changed. We had now made a second, successive policy mistake, allowing alien digital whales to straddle the economy and choreograph citizens’ lives. Question: They say that if you fail to learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it; but equally, aren’t you also uncomprehending, incompetent? Silicon Valley Bank Crisis: How India Can Save Its Fledgling Startup EcosystemAI-Driven Digital Valets of the Kings of Silicon Valley Now to the final cut. India has just concluded a gargantuan celebration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments have been announced—alas, overwhelmingly in data centres! That’s a problem. As per some estimates, India’s AI investments are skewed 4:1 towards data centres, with only paltry sums invested in the frontier stuff, ie products, design, chips, and innovations. Can you feel a creeping ennui of déjà vu? Because data centres are akin to the IT Services shops of the 1990s. They are little more than a backroom utility—warehouses of floor-to-ceiling computer stacks that do all the grunge processing for the sexy AI applications springing up in Silicon Valley.They require fantastic amounts of fresh water and electricity—again, scarce Indian resources that are being sucked away by entitled tech giants to create their prodigious, trillion-dollar algos overseas, outside India’s boundaries.What an irony! We’ve also given them 22-year tax holidays and 40 percent discounts on power tariffs to sweeten their DACOITY!! Don’t get me wrong. Of course, we need to double down on hundreds and thousands of data centres to lay the infrastructure bedrock of our AI ambitions. But we should not get arrested at the bottom of the value chain. Why can’t we mandate that Silicon Valley has to set up joint ventures with Indian entrepreneurs to craft edge-of-research products? Only then will we allow them to use our cheap data centres. Why shouldn’t we insist that tech-conglomerates like Reliance and Adani eschew “glorified, low-tech, real estate forays”? Instead, they must invest their headline-grabbing $210 billion in truly risky, breakthrough projects that could leave the OpenAIs and Anthropics flat-footed? Because if we don’t do this, we would have failed to learn from history a third time, perhaps getting condemned to remain the Digital Valet of the Kings of Silicon Valley.The Great AI Paradox: Everyone Says It’s a Bubble, No One’s Slowing Down