Cybersecurity researcher Anand V and CEO coach Srinath Sridharan explore India’s digital sovereignty in their new book, Power of UncertAInty. They argue that India relies too much on foreign technology and supply chains. The authors said, "Financial inclusion cannot substitute for income inclusion," highlighting the gap between progress and control.
Cybersecurity researcher Anand V and Strategic counsel and CEO coach Srinath Sridharan's book Power of UncertAInty: The Battle for Privacy, Identity and Sovereignty begins with a question that sounds abstract but is increasingly visible in everyday life: how sovereign is India if its digital, financial and technological systems depend on institutions, technologies and supply chains it does not fully control?
The book's answer goes beyond political independence. Sovereignty, the authors argue, is the ability to act with the tools at a nation's disposal and manage the consequences. India's weakness, therefore, is not a lack of talent or ambition, but the gap between individual achievement and institutional capability.
The authors make this argument through subjects ranging from KYC procedures and poor banking services to UPI-enabled financial crime, industrial policy, artificial intelligence, and semiconductor supply chains. These seemingly disparate problems become part of a larger question about India's capacity to exercise control over its economic and technological future.
One of the book's compelling ideas is that India should not confuse visible digital progress with genuine technological sovereignty. Financial inclusion cannot substitute for income inclusion. "Made-in-India" does not necessarily mean that the components, intellectual property or technology behind a product are Indian. Nor does having engineers develop advanced technologies for global companies mean that India owns or controls those technologies.
This distinction is particularly relevant to artificial intelligence. India remains dependent on overseas capabilities across the AI supply chain, from advanced computing hardware to semiconductor manufacturing. NVIDIA's dominance in AI accelerators and Taiwan's TSMC's role in advanced chip fabrication illustrate how critical capabilities are concentrated outside India.
AI dilemmas
As evidence of the above hypothesis by the authors, one can cite the government's IndiaAI Mission, which has onboarded more than 38,000- 45,000 GPUs for shared computing, and is an important step towards expanding access. Yet access to computing does not, by itself, establish control over the underlying technology.
When it comes to the discussion of UPI and financial crime, rather than blaming digital payments themselves, the authors examine how regulatory gaps and information asymmetries can be exploited by criminal networks. The broader lesson is that technological infrastructure can advance faster than the State's ability to understand and govern the systems built around it.
The authors are also persuasive when they distinguish individual excellence from societal capability. India can produce exceptional engineers and entrepreneurs while failing to convert their talent into durable national capabilities. Their comparisons with China, the US and Taiwan underline the slow, unglamorous work required to build industrial ecosystems.
Strong on diagnosis
However, the diagnosis is often more convincing than the prescription. Across the chapters, familiar problems recur -- weak state capacity, inadequate industrial depth, regulatory failures, poor institutional accountability, insufficient urgency and excessive dependence on foreign technology. The proposed remedies: stronger industrial policy, better institutions, long-term thinking, and greater freedom for experimentation, are sensible, but often familiar.
The book's call for a "freedom-fuelled" technological future is particularly interesting. It envisages a State capable of building strategic infrastructure while allowing cities, companies and citizens the freedom to experiment. But how India can reconcile strategic coordination with decentralised innovation remains insufficiently explored.
Ultimately, the book's contribution lies less in offering a blueprint for technological innovation than in connecting problems often discussed separately. Its central insight is that adopting technology does not automatically confer the capacity to control it. India must decide which capabilities it needs to build, which dependencies it can manage and how to turn individual excellence into national strength.
Power of UncertAInty is more compelling as a diagnosis of India's hidden dependencies than as a blueprint for overcoming them. Its questions are important, even if its answers are less distinctive.