ATMANIRBHAR BHARAT NEEDS SWADESHI 2.0

INDIA has always been a magnet for marauders, a honey-pot for hustlers, a paradise perpetually plundered by profiteers

- PRABHU CHAWLA

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav declared he was replacing foreign-owned digital systems with Zoho, a desi firm, for accounting and data storage.

Atmanirbhar Bharat? Heck no. Soho to Zoho is a symbolic flicker of self-reliance in a vast ocean of foreign control. The British are gone, but the buccaneer breed begets billions. The imperial flag no longer pollutes the skies of India, but a new imperium thrives: the West India Company. The British bastions are buried, but the Western buccaneer breed begets billions in bounty—the West India Company 2.0 of American artifice. Where old colonisers carted away cotton, gold, and opium, the new ones covet craftier cargo—data, the digital diamonds of the 21st century. Cloaked as auditors, advisers, and analysts, these agencies have infiltrated India’s governance, embedded themselves in ministries, and ensnared the state in a web of dependency. What once was conquest by commerce is now colonisation by consultancy.

If India is serious about self-reliance, it must not skim the surface. It must strike at the root. That root today has been poisoned by the Big Four, the globetrotting giants of audit and consultancy: Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG. Their glass towers in Bandra-Kurla and Aerocity masquerade as shrines of elite efficiency, but are really fortresses of foreign influence. According to public reports, together they gobbled up %38,000 crore last year alone, outpacing global growth rates and tightening their talons on Indian soil. Deloitte’s Indian billing crossed 210,000 crore, PwC’s %9,200 crore, EY’s amonstrous 713,400 crore, and KPMG captured 26,000 crore. These aren’t just balance-sheet numbers; they are bills for borrowed brains, receipts of reliance, and invoices of intellectual outsourcing. Sensitive data from Reliance, HDFC, Adani, and L&T flows not just through Indian servers but to firms whose loyalties lie in London and New York. This is espionage by Excel.