Is India’s digital boom quietly repeating a 19th century pattern? Part Two of this series takes Dadabhai Naoroji’s old question, who creates the value, who owns it, and where does it end up, and applies it to today’s economy.
Naoroji’s ‘Home Charges’ had five parts, and this piece maps each one onto a modern equivalent. Interest on colonial debt now looks like royalty payments Indian companies send abroad for foreign patents and software licenses, these have grown roughly 4.5 times in a decade, hitting over $15 billion in 2024-25. It’s not forced, but it’s a one way, recurring outflow, and there’s even an OECD term for the broader mechanism, Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, which costs governments worldwide up to $240 billion a year in lost tax revenue.
Guaranteed returns to British railway investors have a gentler modern cousin: foreign venture capital that structures for large ownership stakes and exits, with many top Indian startups historically incorporated in Singapore or Delaware rather than India. The old rule forcing India to buy British made stores shows up now as India’s electronics trade gap, $116 billion imported against just $48 billion exported in the last fiscal year, mostly because India assembles smartphones brilliantly but still imports most of the chips inside them. And the colonial official’s pension has flipped entirely, Global Capability Centres now employ two million Indians and generate $70 billion a year for multinational owners, the salary stays in India, but the equity and IP don’t.
There’s also a new category colonialism never had: land itself, reimagined as data centres. India generates nearly a fifth of the world’s data but holds only 3-4% of global data centre capacity, meaning most of the infrastructure storing Indian data belongs to shareholders elsewhere.
The numbers aren’t all bleak, India’s services exports hit a record $421 billion last year, making it the world’s seventh largest services exporter. But the article’s key distinction is that this is mostly labor income (payment for work done), not ownership income (a share of what the platform becomes worth). When India tried taxing platform value directly through its 2016 ‘Google Tax’, it was withdrawn by 2025 under trade pressure. Crucially, the article is careful not to call this exploitation, every transaction is voluntary, and foreign platforms deliver real value. The argument instead is narrower and sharper: India creates enormous value but captures a smaller share of it than its scale should allow, and that’s a gap in ownership and bargaining power, not villainy.
The full article is available on Chapter One Mag.
