Indian IT in different perspective

India’s IT sector built its reputation solving complex problems for companies in the US and Europe—integrating systems, modernizing infrastructure, implementing SAP deployments across global enterprises. The capability is real and substantial. What’s striking is how unevenly that capability has translated into transformation within India’s own domestic industries.

In 2008, the gap was visible. Large Indian manufacturing companies, retailers, and real estate firms were growing fast—riding genuine economic expansion—but many were running operations that hadn’t kept pace with their scale. IT was often treated as a cost center, something to be minimized rather than leveraged strategically. The mindset was understandable: these were businesses built on relationships, logistics, and execution, not on software. But it created a mismatch between organizational complexity and the systems being used to manage it.

SOA—Service-Oriented Architecture—was getting serious attention as a business integration strategy at the time. Grupo Santander’s CIO Jose Maria Fuster articulated it well: the maturity of standards like SOA and XML was making it genuinely easier to integrate commercial packages, to connect systems that had been built separately and needed to work together. For large, complex organizations, that kind of integration is not a technology problem—it’s a strategic one. The architecture decisions you make about how systems connect and share data shape what you can do operationally for years afterward.

ITC’s e-choupal initiative stood out as a counterexample. The project connected rural farmers directly to market information and procurement networks, using IT not as back-office infrastructure but as a core piece of the business model. It worked because the technology served a real operational need and was designed around the constraints of its users—low bandwidth, limited literacy, intermittent connectivity. The IT expertise was applied inward, to an Indian problem, with genuine effect.

The broader point is about where strategic thinking gets applied. India had, and has, deep expertise in using technology to transform business processes. The question is whether business leaders treat IT investment as a line item to be minimized or as a lever for competitive advantage. Those two framings produce very different outcomes. One produces marginally lower costs. The other produces the kind of structural change that compounds over time.

The domestic opportunity was—and in many sectors still is—considerably larger than what’s been captured.