An industrial policy for the digital century

India’s current industrial framework must evolve from the vocabulary of sectors and subsidies to the language of systems and sovereignty

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

INDUSTRIAL POLICY HAS returned to the centre of global strategy, but the factories of this age rarely announce themselves.

They hum quietly in data centres, automated warehouses, and high-performance compute clusters—places where the assembly line has become a line of code. The question is not whether automation will come, but whether societies can redesign work, education, and enterprise fast enough to keep their people central to the story of progress.

For a populous country like India, with its vast and youthful workforce, this demands a rethinking, or even thinking, of what the industries of the future will be, and what the future of industries must look like. Yet as the world’s most enthusiastic digital consumer, do we have an industrial policy for this invisible revolution?

We have been the global tech back office, even if we don’t like the phrase. We build the rails, but others own the trains. The result is a familiar national paradox-a country that participates in every global technology or industrial wave but owns very little of the tide. If we look beyond Trump's tariffs, tech sanctions, and the swagger of Big Tech supremacy, a deeper truth emerges-the world is already at war for digital dominance.