7 minutes reading time
Every few months, some tech guy in an ironed linen shirt on LinkedIn posts a chart about India's software dominance.
Millions of engineers. Billions in IT exports. Half of Bengaluru staring at VS Code under air-conditioned ambient lighting while the municipal drain outside overflows into the street. They love to call it a "tech powerhouse."
It's a lie.
India doesn't have a software industry. It has a high-tech call center industry that swapped headsets for Java enterprise frameworks. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant - they don't build software. They rent human sweat by the hour. A client in Frankfurt or Charlotte wants a legacy COBOL pipeline converted to Spring Boot, so we dump three hundred college graduates into a bay, bill twenty-five dollars an hour per head, and hand over the IP. The moment the project finishes, the code is sealed behind an NDA, the repo is wiped from the local machines, and the warm bodies are shuffled to the next billing cycle.
We don't build software. We consume it, wrap it in client SLAs, and shovel it over the fence.
Look, I know I'm generalizing. There are individual Indian maintainers grinding away late at night submitting patches to Linux kernel trees, tweaking Rust toolchains, or building small infra projects. I see you. But you're swimming against a roaring tsunami of corporate inertia. The corporate gravity, where 95% of our engineering talent and capital sit, remains firmly locked in billing-hour servitude.
When you look at the global open-source commons - the actual foundational bedrock that keeps the internet running - India's corporate contribution is almost zero. We didn't build Linux. We didn't write PostgreSQL, Python, Rust, Redis, or LLVM. We didn't even build decent middleware. Aside from a few exceptions like Frappe or Hasura, our entire multi-billion-dollar IT sector operates as pure parasites on the global commons. We pull down Apache, Nginx, Linux, and Debian for free, use them to power client infrastructure, bill the client, and give absolutely nothing back upstream.
Even China, with all its state firewalls and proprietary internet walled gardens, routinely dumps massive open-source infrastructure into the wild. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Huawei - they run infrastructure at a scale where they had to write their own RPC frameworks, distributed databases, diagnostic tools, and mobile inference engines. And then they open-sourced them. Dubbo, TiDB, ncnn, openEuler. Why? Because when you actually build products instead of just selling developer hours, open-sourcing your core rails attracts global talent and sets technical standards.
When an Indian IT manager hears the word "open source," his first instinct isn't "strategic advantage." It's terror. "What if the client sues us? What if our code looks dirty? How does this increase Q3 billable hours?"
And why would it? Look at where the money actually goes. Indian IT companies are asset-light cash machines generating tens of thousands of crores in free cash flow every year. Unlike manufacturing or telecom, they don't need to rebuild steel plants or lay subsea cables. Yet their reported R&D spending is a pathetic rounding error, well under 1 to 2 percent of revenue, compared to the 15 to 20 percent reinvested by global software firms like Microsoft or Alphabet.
Where does all that cash go? Between 70 and 90 percent of free cash flow is immediately funneled straight into shareholder dividends, special payouts, and stock buybacks. TCS, Infosys, and Wipro sit on tens of thousands of crores in cash reserves, but instead of risking even 5 percent of that capital to build a global open-source database, an operating system kernel, or an infrastructure framework, they treat R&D as internal delivery automation scripts and dump the rest into financial dividend grease to keep institutional investors happy.
And then comes the cope.
Whenever you point out that Indian companies haven't built a single globally influential piece of open-source software, the domestic tech evangelists immediately pull out their favorite shield: Digital Public Infrastructure.
"What about UPI? What about Aadhaar? What about DigiLocker? India leads the world in open digital rails!"
I want to laugh every time I hear this.
Now, some policy guy in Delhi will read this and complain I'm making a category error. "UPI wasn't built to be a forkable Linux repository," they'll lecture. "It was built for financial inclusion, transaction velocity, and breaking the rent-seeking monopoly of foreign card networks like Visa and Mastercard."
Fair enough. Credit where it's due: replacing Visa's percentage cuts with a zero-MDR domestic settlement rail was a genuinely smart economic move for street vendors and small merchants. I'm not denying that.
My problem isn't that UPI exists as a financial tool. My problem is the dishonest bait-and-switch: whenever domestic tech evangelists go on international stages to brag about Indian "open software leadership", they hold up UPI as their crown jewel.
There is a fundamental confusion between shared state-regulated infrastructure and an open public commons.
Linux is an open public commons. PostgreSQL is a commons. OpenStreetMap is a commons. If I want to take the Linux kernel, fork it, rewrite the scheduler, spin up my own distribution, and run it on a server in my bedroom, I don't ask anyone for permission. I don't sign an NDA with a government bureaucrat. I don't file compliance paperwork with a bank. Linus Torvalds doesn't get to audit my laptop. The code is out there. The commons belongs to whoever compiles it.
Now try doing that with UPI.
Try writing your own UPI server tonight. Try connecting your home homelab directly to the UPI settlement rail. You can't. You'll have RBI inspectors, NPCI bureaucrats, and bank compliance lawyers sitting on your chest before your first packet hits the gateway.
UPI is not open software. It is not an open commons. It is a tightly regulated, state-sanctioned financial wire controlled by a consortium of banks and government entities. It has open API specifications and interoperability for approved apps, yes. Google Pay and PhonePe can talk to the same settlement engine. That's nice. It makes buying a ten-rupee cup of tea at a roadside stall convenient.
But convenience isn't freedom. Interoperability inside a walled police garden isn't open source.
And let's drop the fairy tale that NPCI is some struggling, selfless public charity. NPCI is a Section 8 not-for-profit company promoted by major banks that pulled in over ₹3,200 crore in operating revenue and stashed away ₹1,500 crore in net surplus in a single financial year. That's a 47% operating margin, a net surplus that would make a Silicon Valley monopoly turn green with envy. It sits on an accumulated reserve of over ₹5,400 crore while member banks enjoy cheaper payment rails and governance control. It is a wildly profitable, state-backed utility monopoly. Useful? Absolutely. FOSS or an open public commons? Not even close.
Calling UPI a "public digital good" in the same breath as Linux or Wikipedia is like calling the national highway network open-source software because anyone with a registered toll tag can drive on it. You don't own the road. You can't modify the lane markings. And if the state decides to block your FASTag tomorrow morning, you sit on the shoulder and watch the traffic go by.
We've fallen into a pathetic trap. We confuse being the world's most enthusiastic consumer of other people's technology with having technical agency. We celebrate state-controlled payment protocols while our corporate behemoths refuse to write a single compiler, database engine, or operating system component.
Twelve years ago I wrote an open letter complaining about BOSS Linux - our state-backed attempt at an operating system that ended up being a broken Debian wrapper pushed by C-DAC bureaucrats who couldn't even set up a Torrent link for a 3 GB ISO image over flaky BSNL 2G. A decade later, nothing has changed. The mindset is identical: lock everything down, rely on central government oversight, consume foreign open-source bases, and pretend it's a national triumph.
We don't build the rails. We just pay the toll and pretend we own the highway.