Beyond Abandonware: Preserving the Valuable Ideas of Open Source

Introduction: Software Should Outlive Its Creator

The open-source ecosystem has given the world an extraordinary gift: software that anyone can study, modify, share and build upon. Yet there is a weakness we rarely discuss with the same enthusiasm as we celebrate new projects. Useful software can become abandoned simply because the person who created it no longer has the time, energy or resources to maintain it.

A developer may create a remarkably useful application in their spare time. Another may develop a foundational library that enables several other applications to function. A small team may build an alternative to an established product because they believe it can do something better.

Years later, the original developer changes jobs, starts a family, pursues another interest or simply runs out of time. The repository remains online, but updates stop. Dependencies become outdated. Security vulnerabilities accumulate. The application struggles to run on newer operating systems, and its users are left searching for alternatives.

The source code may still be available, but the capability it represents is gradually lost.

The failure lies in an ecosystem that has become very good at creating software but has not developed an equally effective way to preserve its most valuable contributions.

1. The Earlier Warning: Promises Without Delivery

In an earlier article, Tall Stories in the Open Source World, I discussed features that were announced, discussed or anticipated but never materialised as users expected.

One example was the proposed shared-theme functionality for Calligra, discussed by Jarosław Staniek in his December 2011 article, Fruits of CSS2: Shared Themes. The idea was to explore CSS-style shared themes for open-source office applications.

Another example was the proposed integration of speech interaction into Ubuntu, discussed by Mark Shuttleworth in 2012, with CMU Sphinx also mentioned in subsequent development discussions.

These examples raised an important question: what happens when promising ideas never progress into usable features, and the community eventually stops asking about them?

My later article, Legacy Audit: Tall Stories in the Open Source World, revisited this issue and broadened the discussion to include Wayland, compatibility and the consequences of long-running transitions.

The underlying concern remains relevant. Open source depends on transparency, but transparency should mean more than publishing source code. It should also mean being honest about roadmaps, explaining abandoned plans and acknowledging when an idea has not succeeded.

Not every proposal deserves to be implemented. Technology changes, priorities shift and some ideas turn out to be impractical. The problem is not cancellation itself. The problem is when the outcome becomes invisible, leaving users and contributors unable to understand what happened.

2. When Projects Compete Without Differentiating Themselves

A different but related problem is the proliferation of applications that perform broadly similar functions without offering a compelling reason to maintain another implementation.

Consider the open-source office-suite ecosystem.

LibreOffice provides a comprehensive desktop productivity suite. ONLYOFFICE takes a different approach, with a strong emphasis on compatibility with Microsoft Office formats and collaborative document workflows. Calligra has its own history, architecture and specialised applications.

The existence of several office suites is not inherently wasteful. Different users have different requirements, and architectural diversity can be valuable.

However, every additional suite carries a maintenance burden: document compatibility, formatting fidelity, accessibility, interface design, security, packaging and integration with operating systems.

If a smaller project offers no distinctive capability, has limited development capacity and reproduces much of what a more established project already provides, the community should ask whether maintaining the entire alternative is the best use of its resources.

Calligra's shared-theme proposal illustrates the importance of differentiation. If distinctive capabilities of this kind were developed into useful, maintained features, they could help establish a clearer reason for users and contributors to choose the project. Without distinctive capabilities, a smaller office suite risks becoming another partial alternative competing for the same limited pool of developers.

This is not an argument that Calligra must disappear or that LibreOffice should become the only office suite. It is an argument for requiring a clear purpose from every project that expects a community to sustain it.

A smaller application can justify its existence through a specialised workflow, a distinctive architecture, better integration with a particular desktop environment or an innovative feature that others have overlooked.

The objective should not be to eliminate alternatives. It should be to eliminate unnecessary duplication while preserving meaningful diversity.

3. The Forgotten Cost of Foundational Dependencies

Sometimes the application itself is not the problem. Its foundations are.

An application can be well designed and useful while depending on a library that becomes difficult to maintain. A new version of a GUI toolkit may require substantial changes. An abandoned language binding may prevent an application from upgrading its dependencies. Changes in graphics systems, security models or operating-system APIs may demand expertise that the original maintainer does not possess.

The transition from GTK 2 to GTK 3, for example, required applications to adapt to changed APIs and other aspects of the toolkit. Later transitions introduced further work. For a large application with a funded development team, such migrations can be planned engineering projects. For a niche utility maintained by one person, they can become overwhelming.

This creates a dependency problem that is often overlooked when people discuss abandoned software.

A project can lose its future because one of its dependencies loses its maintainers, because a critical API changes or because maintaining compatibility across platforms becomes too expensive.

The same problem affects the foundations of software development itself: libraries, language bindings, codecs, runtimes, compilers, drivers and other shared components.

When one of these components is used by many applications, its abandonment can have consequences far beyond its own repository.

The community may end up maintaining several incompatible forks, replacing working implementations or rewriting functionality that already existed.

A repository can survive while the ecosystem's ability to use its code gradually deteriorates.

4. Shutter: A Reminder That Useful Software Deserves a Future

Shutter, the Linux screenshot and annotation utility, illustrates the value of preserving a complete user workflow rather than judging an application by its headline function alone.

Taking a screenshot is straightforward. Building a productive workflow around it is another matter.

Users may depend on region selection, delayed captures, annotation tools, numbered steps, image redaction and the ability to prepare a screenshot for documentation or technical support.

Another screenshot application might provide the basic capture functionality but omit several of these features. Its existence does not automatically make Shutter redundant.

Shutter's history also demonstrates that the problem is not necessarily a single abandoned dependency. Changes in toolkits, graphics systems and platform support can all make continued development more difficult.

The important question is whether the software's distinctive functionality remains valuable enough to justify maintaining it.

If the answer is yes, the community should investigate whether the existing project can be revived, whether its maintainers need additional help or whether some of its functionality could be developed into reusable components for other applications.

A useful application should not have to be rewritten from scratch merely because its original author can no longer sustain it.

Nor should its creator be expected to work indefinitely without compensation or assistance.

5. Preserve the Capability, Not Necessarily the Entire Project

Not every abandoned application needs to be revived in its original form.

There are at least four possible outcomes.

Maintain: The project still serves a meaningful purpose and has a viable technical direction. Provide the resources needed to keep it secure, compatible and useful.

Consolidate: Another project already offers a suitable home for the valuable functionality. Integrate the missing capabilities upstream where practical, rather than maintaining two implementations indefinitely.

Transfer: The project is valuable, but its original maintainer can no longer lead it. Help another qualified maintainer or organisation assume responsibility.

Archive: The project no longer justifies active maintenance, or its code cannot reasonably be sustained. Preserve its history, licence, documentation and source code, while clearly communicating its unsupported status.

These outcomes should be determined by evidence rather than popularity alone.

A niche application with few users may still be essential to a scientific workflow, an accessibility need, an older computer or a specialised industry. Conversely, a popular application may have become insecure or impossible to maintain responsibly.

The purpose of an audit is to understand what a project contributes, what it costs to maintain and what would be lost if development stopped.

Archiving should not mean erasing history. Consolidation should not mean suppressing innovation. And maintaining a project should not mean committing to every feature that was ever proposed.

The most important objective is to preserve valuable capabilities at a sustainable cost.

6. An Upstream-First Approach to Open Source

When a developer creates a useful feature, the first question should often be whether it can improve an existing project.

A new implementation may be justified when the architecture, licensing, governance or intended use case is genuinely different. But where an established project can accommodate the functionality, upstreaming the contribution can give it a wider user base, more reviewers, better testing and a stronger chance of long-term maintenance.

This is particularly important for small libraries and reusable components.

Imagine a developer creating an excellent image-redaction function for a screenshot application. If it remains buried inside that application's code, other developers may independently implement similar functionality. If it can instead become a well-maintained component, other screenshot tools, document applications and image editors may benefit.

The individual contribution remains recognisable, but its impact expands.

This principle should also guide project funding. Before financing another implementation of an existing capability, organisations should investigate whether the same outcome could be achieved by improving an established upstream project.

The aim is not to centralise all software development into a handful of enormous projects. Independent experiments, forks and specialised applications remain important. The aim is to make successful ideas easier to share and maintain.

7. A Consortium for Software Continuity

One possible response is a globally open organisation dedicated to the long-term maintenance of valuable open-source software.

An Indian-founded organisation, which I have provisionally called the Indian Open Software Consortium, could support this mission while participating in the wider international open-source ecosystem.

Its purpose would not be to acquire every abandoned repository or dictate which projects survive. It would identify software that is important to users or other projects, assess its maintenance needs and help provide the engineering capacity necessary to sustain it.

Its activities could include:

• Funding experienced maintainers to work on important but under-resourced projects.
• Helping applications migrate to newer toolkits, libraries and operating-system interfaces.
• Maintaining foundational libraries and language bindings used by multiple applications.
• Finding successor maintainers when original contributors step away.
• Funding security fixes, compatibility testing, reproducible builds and release engineering.
• Helping projects consolidate duplicate functionality where there is a clear benefit.
• Preserving valuable software through documented handovers and responsible archival.

The consortium should be globally open to contributors. A project's lead maintainer should earn that responsibility through technical competence, collaboration and sound stewardship rather than nationality or institutional affiliation.

It should also coordinate with existing organisations instead of duplicating their work. Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, for example, already supports the maintenance and security of important open-source infrastructure. Collaboration could allow engineers to contribute to established international projects while the consortium concentrates on gaps that remain inadequately served.

A particularly valuable role would be to support difficult transitions: the work needed to keep a project viable when its foundational technology changes.

8. From Maintaining Software to Enabling Future Hardware

The same principle extends beyond desktop applications.

Open hardware and open-silicon projects need software that can make their designs useful in real products. Processors and microcontrollers require firmware, drivers, toolchains, operating-system support, APIs and testing infrastructure.

An Indian Open Software Consortium could help maintain such components for RISC-V processors, embedded controllers, smart appliances, computers, industrial systems and automotive electronics.

This would not mean creating every component independently. Much of the work should happen in existing upstream projects, with the consortium funding improvements that benefit the wider ecosystem.

The broader objective is to ensure that important software foundations remain available as hardware and operating systems evolve.

This is also why maintenance deserves to be treated as an investment rather than an afterthought. A library that supports many applications, or a driver that enables several hardware platforms, may generate far more value than its size or visibility suggests.

9. Measure Success by What the Community Retains

The success of such an initiative should not be measured by the number of repositories it adopts, the number of forks it creates or the amount of software it publishes.

More useful measures would include:

• The number of important projects that regain sustainable maintenance.
• The number of critical dependencies with multiple qualified maintainers.
• Reductions in duplicated implementations where consolidation is appropriate.
• Successful migrations to supported libraries and operating-system interfaces.
• Improvements in security, compatibility and reproducible builds.
• The number of valuable features reused across projects.
• The number of projects that complete a responsible handover or archival process.

Some projects should be revived. Others should be consolidated. Some should be archived. The objective is not to keep every repository alive forever; it is to ensure that decisions about software's future are deliberate rather than accidental.

Conclusion: A Culture of Creation Needs a Culture of Continuity

The open-source ecosystem should continue to encourage experimentation, individual creativity and the creation of new projects. Many of its most important innovations began as the work of a single developer or a small group of enthusiasts.

But creating software is only one part of the process. Software also needs to be tested, documented, secured, adapted and maintained. Foundational dependencies need stewardship, and useful applications need a path forward when their original authors can no longer lead them.

The answer is not to discourage individual projects or insist that every idea be absorbed into an established application. It is to provide better ways for useful work to survive.

Sometimes that means funding the original maintainer. Sometimes it means helping a new maintainer take over. Sometimes it means moving a feature into a shared library, merging work upstream or preserving a project in an archive.

A globally open, merit-governed consortium could help coordinate these efforts, working with existing foundations and directing resources towards the gaps that would otherwise leave useful software behind.

The open-source community should not measure its achievement only by how much software it creates. It should also measure how much valuable capability it manages to preserve, improve and pass on to the next generation of developers.

The goal is simple: create freely, maintain collectively, consolidate intelligently and preserve what is genuinely useful.

Breaking the Indian Family Inheritance Deadlock: From Preserving Property to Building Intergenerational Freedom

Introduction: When Family Wealth Becomes a Family Burden

Across India, many families face a difficult contradiction. An older generation spends decades acquiring land, homes, gold or other assets, hoping to create security for its children. Yet, when the time comes to use or distribute that wealth, the family can become trapped in arguments over ownership, valuation, expectations and the fear of future dependence. A property may be worth several crores on paper, yet remain difficult to sell. One family member may want to accept a reasonable offer, while another insists that a much higher price is possible. The older generation fears losing its financial security. The younger generation continues working under financial pressure, waiting for a future inheritance that may remain unresolved for years. Meanwhile, school fees, housing costs, household expenses, demanding jobs and the responsibilities of raising children continue in the present. The result is a peculiar form of family wealth: everyone may be connected to a valuable asset, but nobody feels entirely financially free. Perhaps the question should change. Instead of asking only how much an inherited property might be worth in the future, families should ask how that wealth can provide security, dignity and a better life for every generation.

1. Understanding the Different Generations

The Older Generation: Wealth Represents Security

For many parents and grandparents, property represents much more than money. It represents years of hard work, sacrifice, patience and survival through uncertain times. They may have acquired land when consumption patterns were different, educational expectations were lower, and household life did not involve the same combination of digital expenses, commuting, private schooling and modern domestic demands. Their reluctance to sell is understandable. Once land is sold and the proceeds are distributed, the original asset cannot simply be recovered. They may worry about outliving their money, losing control over family decisions or becoming dependent on children who have their own responsibilities. These concerns deserve respect. However, retaining property does not automatically guarantee care, loyalty or financial independence. An asset may appreciate while its owner struggles to meet immediate expenses. It may generate rent but remain difficult to sell. It may also become the subject of prolonged family disputes. The older generation therefore needs a plan that protects its future without making indefinite property retention the only acceptable option.

The Younger Generation: Income Does Not Always Mean Freedom

The working generation faces a different economic environment. A household may depend on two salaries while managing school fees, housing costs, transport, technology, childcare, household work and loan repayments. Both adults may spend much of their day working, commuting and meeting obligations. Even when their income appears reasonable, their time and mental energy may be severely constrained. Modern household expenses are not all necessities. Some are discretionary, and families should make sensible spending decisions. Nevertheless, education, digital access, domestic support and the costs of raising children can place real pressure on working households. Inherited wealth, if managed thoughtfully, could reduce this pressure. It might help eliminate expensive debt, fund education, improve housing, purchase useful appliances, employ cooking or cleaning assistance, or create an investment portfolio that gives a household greater freedom to change jobs. The goal need not be to stop working. It may simply be to make work a choice based more on interest and purpose than on the fear of being unable to pay next month's bills.

2. The Inheritance Deadlock: When an Asking Price Becomes an Expectation

Industrial plots, agricultural land and other specialised properties can be particularly difficult to sell. A property may have a substantial estimated value, yet the pool of qualified buyers may be small. Zoning, access, title, development permissions, tenancy arrangements and transfer restrictions can all influence what a buyer is prepared to pay. Family disagreements often begin when one person proposes a realistic sale while another insists that the property should command a much higher price. Consider an illustrative industrial plot of approximately 3,200 square feet. A neighbouring plot of similar size is reported to have sold for ₹6–7 crore, while some family members hope to receive ₹25 crore. The higher price might be possible if the property has demonstrable advantages or if market conditions support such a valuation. But hope alone is not evidence. A reported neighbouring transaction is also not conclusive. The transaction should be verified, and differences in title, frontage, access, permitted use and other relevant features should be examined. Families should therefore distinguish between three figures:

• Expected price: What family members hope to receive.
• Estimated market value: What independent valuation and comparable transactions suggest.
• Realised price: What a qualified buyer is genuinely willing and able to pay under acceptable terms.

Confusing these figures can leave a family waiting indefinitely for a price that may never materialise. The solution is not to accept the first offer or to dismiss every higher expectation. It is to establish a defensible valuation, invite competing offers and set a reasonable period for reviewing the evidence.

3. The Hidden Cost of Holding Property

Families frequently calculate the future value of property without fully calculating the cost of retaining it. A plot may appreciate over thirty years, but its owner must still consider the income it generates, maintenance expenses, taxes, legal obligations, vacancy risks and the possibility of disputes. If a property is leased, the lease may restrict the timing or terms of a sale. If the owner has borrowed money against rental income, repayments may reduce the amount of cash actually received. Suppose an industrial plot worth ₹6 crore generates gross rent of ₹1.15 lakh per month. Its annual gross rental income is ₹13.8 lakh, equivalent to approximately 2.3 per cent of the property's current value. That figure alone does not establish whether holding or selling is better. The family must account for expenses, debts, potential appreciation, future rent changes, taxes and the realistic proceeds from a sale. It should also compare the property with what the capital could reasonably accomplish elsewhere. A property that appreciates significantly may ultimately prove valuable to retain. However, a large future valuation does not necessarily solve today's liquidity problem. The important question is not simply whether the property will become more valuable. It is whether retaining it provides enough benefit to justify the financial opportunities and years of flexibility being surrendered.

4. Equal Distribution as a Starting Point for Family Independence

One possible approach is to consider an equal distribution among the immediate family members, where legally appropriate and voluntarily agreed. For example, suppose a property sale produces ₹6 crore in net distributable proceeds after settling outstanding liabilities and applicable costs. An equal division among four family members would provide ₹1.5 crore to each. The parents could use their respective shares to establish independent retirement income and maintain accessible reserves. The adult children could use their shares to reduce debt, invest for the future, fund education or improve their households. This is an illustrative family settlement model, not a universal rule of inheritance or a statement about anyone's legal entitlement. Equal distribution has several potential advantages:

• Each adult receives an identifiable financial foundation.
• The older generation can plan for its own lifetime needs.
• Both sons and daughters can receive independent resources.
• Family members can make financial decisions without having to negotiate every expense through a central pool of inherited wealth.
• The family can reduce uncertainty about who expects to receive what in the future.

Equal shares are not automatically fair in every situation. Medical needs, dependent children, earlier financial assistance, legal ownership and existing obligations may differ. Families should discuss these circumstances openly. Most importantly, equal distribution should not be imposed on an owner who does not agree to it. If a property is legally owned by one person, the proposed distribution must be considered alongside that person's rights, obligations and intended estate plan.

5. Protect the Elder Before Distributing the Wealth

The greatest mistake would be to replace one family problem with another. An elder should not be pressured to distribute all their assets and then rely on informal promises of care. Family affection is valuable, but it is not a substitute for a financial plan. Before making substantial transfers, the elder should estimate the resources required for:

• Housing and everyday living expenses.
• Healthcare, medical emergencies and potential long-term assistance.
• Inflation and unexpected increases in expenditure.
• Accessible emergency savings.
• Independent living if family circumstances change.

The elder should also obtain independent legal and financial advice. The arrangement should protect their ability to make decisions and maintain dignity. If the remaining property is the elder's main financial security, the need for careful planning is even greater. The objective is not to preserve the maximum possible inheritance at the expense of the elder's present life. Nor is it to distribute wealth so quickly that the elder becomes vulnerable. It is to establish a secure foundation first, then determine what can responsibly be shared.

6. Turning Capital into Lifelong Income

Once capital becomes available, families have several options for generating income. Different instruments serve different purposes. No single product should automatically receive the entire corpus.

Immediate Annuities

A suitable immediate annuity can provide income for the lifetime of the covered individual or individuals, according to the chosen option. For example, LIC Smart Pension Option J provides an annuity while either of the two covered annuitants remains alive, with the purchase price returned to the nominee after the last survivor dies, subject to the policy terms. This can address an important retirement risk: the possibility of outliving one's savings. However, the purchase price is generally committed to the contract. The owner should not assume it can be freely withdrawn later. Fixed nominal annuity income can also lose purchasing power through inflation. An annuity may therefore be useful for covering a portion of essential expenses, while other funds remain accessible. Actual annuity rates depend on factors including age, selected benefits, purchase price and payment frequency. Families should obtain current quotations rather than relying on illustrative estimates.

Other Income-Producing Investments

Depending on eligibility, investment limits and individual circumstances, families may also consider:

• Post Office Monthly Income Scheme for periodic interest income.
• Senior Citizens' Savings Scheme for eligible senior citizens.
• Floating Rate Savings Bonds for government-backed interest income under their applicable terms.
• Bank savings and sweep deposits for accessible funds.
• Fixed deposits and other suitable fixed-income investments.
• Diversified mutual funds for long-term growth, with the understanding that returns and withdrawals are not guaranteed.

Each option has different rules, tax treatment, liquidity and risks. Senior-citizen schemes have eligibility requirements, while market-linked investments can fluctuate in value. A resilient plan might combine emergency reserves, dependable income, long-term investments and an appropriate annuity rather than placing everything in one instrument. The purpose is to create financial independence, not merely to replace a piece of land with another inflexible asset.

7. The Mental Health Dividend: What Family Wealth Can Give Back

One of the least discussed benefits of inherited wealth is its potential to reduce chronic household pressure. Imagine a working couple who no longer need to devote every available rupee to immediate obligations. They may be able to reduce expensive debt, pay school fees without constant anxiety, improve their living conditions or obtain assistance with repetitive household work. A dishwasher, a robot vacuum cleaner, useful kitchen equipment or paid cooking assistance may free time that would otherwise be consumed by domestic chores. Such purchases should be evaluated sensibly. They are not automatically good investments, and they should not consume money needed for retirement or emergencies. But their value should not be measured only by resale price. Time saved, physical effort reduced and opportunities created are also relevant. The same applies to financial flexibility. A person who can afford to change jobs, take a break, pursue additional training or reject persistently harmful working conditions has options that a financially constrained person may not have. The aim is not to make every job optional or encourage unlimited consumption. It is to give people greater control over their time and decisions. Mental health cannot be reduced to a financial calculation, and financial resources alone do not resolve every difficulty. Nevertheless, persistent financial insecurity and overwhelming obligations can contribute to stress. A well-designed family settlement may help reduce some of these pressures.

8. The Value of Time Across Generations

A family considering whether to retain or sell property should examine not only future wealth but also the time during which that wealth could improve people's lives. Children grow up. Parents age. Working adults have finite energy. Opportunities for education, relationships, recreation and meaningful work occur at particular stages of life. Waiting another decade for a higher property price may prove financially beneficial. It may also impose costs that do not appear on any balance sheet. Conversely, selling too early at a poor price and spending the proceeds without a plan can undermine future security. The appropriate question is therefore not whether the family should always sell or always retain property. It is whether the expected benefits of holding the asset justify the cost of waiting, given the family's present needs, the owner's future security and the realistic alternatives available. This is a decision about the allocation of wealth across time, not merely a negotiation over a sale price.

9. A Practical Framework for Breaking the Deadlock

Families can make the process more constructive by following a transparent sequence.

Step 1: Establish the Legal Position

Confirm who legally owns the property, how it was acquired, whether other rights exist, and what legal arrangements govern succession or transfer. A verbal family understanding should not automatically be treated as a legally enforceable distribution.

Step 2: Establish the Financial Position

Prepare a clear statement of rental income, outstanding debts, repayment arrangements, lease conditions, maintenance expenses and other obligations. Calculate the actual net proceeds that could be available after a sale.

Step 3: Obtain Independent Valuations

Use professionals familiar with the relevant property market. Verify comparable registered transactions where possible and distinguish asking prices from completed sales. Invite genuine written offers from qualified buyers rather than relying entirely on family estimates or informal broker claims.

Step 4: Define the Elder's Security Requirement

Calculate the resources needed for the elder's housing, daily living, healthcare, emergencies and future care. Protect the elder's independence before deciding how much capital can be distributed.

Step 5: Discuss the Younger Generation's Needs

Consider education, debt, housing, household pressures and long-term investment needs. These should be discussed openly, without assuming that the younger generation is entitled to unlimited support or that its present difficulties are irrelevant.

Step 6: Compare Realistic Alternatives

Compare retaining the property, selling it, leasing it further where appropriate, or exploring a partial sale or other lawful arrangement. Use conservative assumptions for appreciation and investment returns. Account for taxes, transaction costs, inflation and liquidity.

Step 7: Document the Decision

Once the owner and relevant family members agree, obtain appropriate legal and financial advice to document the chosen arrangement. Clear documentation can reduce later disputes and make it easier for each person to plan independently.

10. What If the Family Still Cannot Agree?

Not every family will reach consensus. One member may prioritise future appreciation, another immediate income, and another a larger share of the proceeds. The solution is not necessarily to force everyone to adopt the same personal priorities. Instead, establish which decisions belong to the legal owner, which require agreement from other rights-holders, and which are matters of personal preference. A neutral mediator may help family members discuss the evidence without turning the process into a contest of personalities. Independent legal advice is particularly important when ownership, succession rights or existing financial obligations are disputed. No one should be rushed into signing away property rights or transferring large sums because of family pressure. Similarly, a family should not assume that every high valuation is unrealistic simply because it is inconvenient. A higher price should be tested against evidence and genuine buyer demand. The objective is a reasoned decision, not a victory for the loudest participant.

Conclusion: Inheritance Should Expand Freedom

The older generation deserves recognition for the assets it has built. The younger generation deserves the opportunity to use those assets, where lawfully and responsibly made available, to create a more secure and meaningful life. Preserving wealth and improving life are not opposing objectives. The challenge is to allocate resources so that neither the elder's future security nor the younger generation's present well-being is unnecessarily sacrificed. A property may be worth more in thirty years. It may also provide greater value today if its proceeds are used carefully to secure retirement, reduce financial pressure, support education and create independent financial foundations. The right answer will differ between families. Some should retain their property. Others may benefit from selling, diversifying or distributing a portion of their wealth. Many will need a combination of approaches. But every family should ask itself a question that is often overlooked: Are we preserving our wealth to serve our family, or are we asking our family to spend its best years serving the preservation of wealth? Inheritance should not become a permanent source of uncertainty, dependence and conflict. It should be an opportunity to transform one generation's effort into greater security, dignity and freedom for the next—without abandoning the generation that made that opportunity possible. The most successful family settlement is not necessarily the one that leaves the largest final estate. It is the one that allows each generation to live with reasonable security, mutual respect and greater control over its future.

Don't Build From Zero: Why India Should Join Europe's Open Silicon Ecosystem Now

India's semiconductor conversation is usually framed around fabs, process nodes and billions of rupees of investment.

Those things matter. But there is another resource that may matter even more in the long term: people who know how to build the hardware and software that go into those fabs.

India already has a large and capable software workforce. It has experience in programming, simulation, verification, cloud infrastructure, embedded software and mathematical modelling. What India has historically lacked is the same depth of accumulated industrial experience in semiconductor design, reusable hardware IP, verification, advanced packaging and hardware-software co-design.

That gap creates an unusual opportunity.

Across Europe, a collection of open-source and publicly supported projects is beginning to build exactly those foundational layers. RISC-V processors, accelerators, interconnects, memory systems, hardware abstraction, software-defined systems, open government workspaces and advanced FD-SOI process technology are developing in parallel.

India does not need to wait until all of these capabilities exist domestically before participating.

It should join the learning process now.

Europe Is Building More Than Individual Open-Source Projects

At first glance, Europe's digital-sovereignty efforts can look fragmented.

France has been developing open government and workplace software. Germany has been funding critical open-source infrastructure. The Netherlands is pursuing digital autonomy for government and developing DAWO, an open government workplace based around NixOS, with components covering the operating system, fleet management, AI, cloud, identity and collaboration software. The Dutch government has explicitly identified digital autonomy, open source and reducing strategic dependencies as policy objectives.

At the hardware level, projects such as RIGOLETTO are developing open RISC-V-based platforms.

And beneath that, Europe is investing in semiconductor technologies such as FD-SOI.

Individually, these projects are useful.

Together, they begin to resemble something much more important: the foundations of a sovereign computing stack.

RIGOLETTO Is Particularly Interesting

RIGOLETTO is not simply another attempt to design a RISC-V processor.

Its stated objective is to create a complete open RISC-V hardware platform that European chipmakers, Tier-1 suppliers and automotive manufacturers can share and extend. The project covers processor cores, AI and machine-learning accelerators, interconnects, memory hierarchies and peripheral subsystems, while also concentrating on standardisation and interoperability. It is scheduled to run from July 2025 to July 2028 and involves 72 partners.

That is important because a processor by itself is not a computing platform.

A usable platform requires:

• CPU cores
• accelerators
• memory systems
• interconnects
• peripherals
• security
• firmware
• compilers
• operating-system support
• drivers
• verification
• development tools
• standards

RIGOLETTO is therefore attacking the much harder problem of making open hardware usable as an ecosystem.

That is precisely the direction India should be watching.

The Most Important Part May Be What Happens After 2028

RIGOLETTO's July 2028 end date should not be interpreted as the end of the knowledge it creates.

The European open-hardware ecosystem is already creating mechanisms for projects to feed into one another. The Eclipse Foundation reports that the European Unified RISC-V IP Access Platform, launched in January 2026, brings together verified RISC-V artifacts from projects including TRISTAN, ISOLDE and RIGOLETTO into a common collection.

That is a crucial development.

A publicly funded research project can disappear from the headlines when its grant ends. But its engineers, code, IP, documentation, verification environments, standards work and relationships can continue.

The real output of a project such as RIGOLETTO is therefore not merely a collection of processor designs.

It is a population of people who now know how to build industrial-grade open hardware.

That knowledge can move into the next project.

And then the next one.

That is how an ecosystem forms.

India Should Not Wait for the Ecosystem to Come to India

This creates a strategic choice for India.

India could attempt to construct the entire foundation independently:

• learn RISC-V from scratch
• develop processor architectures
• develop accelerators
• build verification expertise
• develop interconnects
• create hardware abstraction layers
• develop compilers
• write drivers
• learn safety certification
• develop semiconductor IP
• build design flows
• learn hardware-software co-design

Or India could participate in open international projects where much of that learning is already happening.

The second approach is not avoiding learning.

It is learning by doing.

Software May Be India's Bridge Into Hardware

This is where India's historical strengths become relevant.

India has not traditionally been a leading semiconductor manufacturing power. It has, however, developed enormous capabilities in software engineering, simulation, verification, embedded programming, mathematical modelling and large-scale IT systems.

Open hardware changes the boundary between those disciplines.

A modern chip designer does not simply draw transistors and send them to a factory. Much of the work happens through software:

• hardware description languages
• simulation
• formal verification
• test generation
• logic synthesis
• physical-design automation
• power analysis
• timing analysis
• compiler development
• firmware
• drivers

The boundary increasingly looks like this:

Software → simulation → hardware description → verification → synthesis → physical design → silicon.

That is a much more approachable learning path than simply telling a software engineer to become a semiconductor process engineer overnight.

Open PDKs Make the Bridge Even Shorter

The Google-SkyWater programme demonstrated an important part of this model.

Google and SkyWater worked on an open PDK for SkyWater's 90nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process, following the earlier SKY130 open-silicon effort. Google explicitly described open PDKs and manufacturing shuttles as mechanisms for developers and researchers to explore different power, performance and area trade-offs and to build real silicon.

The significance is larger than the particular 90nm process.

An engineer can move from:

software and simulation → RTL → verification → physical design → fabricated chip.

That is an educational pipeline.

It allows people who were previously separated from physical hardware by several layers of industry to begin crossing those boundaries.

India should be paying close attention to this.

Europe Is Also Developing the Other Half: FD-SOI

There is an equally interesting development happening in Europe around FD-SOI.

The FAMES pilot line is developing advanced FD-SOI technologies at 10nm and 7nm, targeting areas such as energy-efficient computing, RF, sensors, embedded memory, edge AI and other applications. Its open-access programme already provides a 10nm FD-SOI pathfinding PDK for digital-circuit evaluation, including standard-cell libraries, SPICE models and physical-verification tools.

FAMES also provides access pathways for technologies including 10nm and 7nm FD-SOI, embedded non-volatile memory, RF components, 3D integration and power-management technologies.

This does not mean that RIGOLETTO is an FD-SOI project.

It is not.

Nor should we assume that every European RISC-V processor will be manufactured using FD-SOI.

The more interesting observation is that Europe is developing open hardware and advanced low-power semiconductor technology at the same time.

Those two developments could eventually reinforce one another.

Why FD-SOI Is Particularly Interesting for India

India does not need advanced semiconductor technology only for supercomputers.

It needs enormous numbers of efficient chips for ordinary things:

• smart meters
• air conditioners
• refrigerators
• washing machines
• water purifiers
• robot vacuums
• industrial controllers
• automotive electronics
• cameras
• sensors
• wearables
• communication equipment
• edge-AI devices
• robotics

FD-SOI's attraction is therefore not simply that it can produce a fast processor.

Its attraction is that it can be part of an energy-efficient computing strategy.

That is precisely the type of technology India could deploy at enormous scale.

The Bigger Opportunity: Hardware Becomes More Software-Defined

This may be the most important insight of all.

Open hardware does not make physical hardware disappear.

Instead, it makes more of the hardware architecture accessible through software, reusable IP and programmable interfaces.

A processor core becomes an IP block.

An accelerator becomes an IP block.

An interconnect becomes an IP block.

A memory controller becomes an IP block.

A peripheral becomes an IP block.

Software then determines how these pieces are used, combined and optimised.

Hardware begins to acquire some of the characteristics of software:

• reuse
• modularity
• versioning
• testing
• repositories
• interfaces
• community contributions
• forks
• improvements
• reference implementations

This is extremely favourable to countries with large software communities.

India should not underestimate that advantage.

The Missing Step Is Participation

India's response should not simply be to create an "Indian RIGOLETTO."

That would miss the point.

The first step should be participation.

Indian universities should participate.

Indian startups should participate.

Indian semiconductor designers should participate.

Indian software engineers should participate.

Indian researchers should participate.

And individual developers should be encouraged to participate.

Not merely as users.

As contributors.

The Difference Between Consuming and Learning

There is a major difference between downloading an open-source processor and contributing to the project that develops it.

The first provides a component.

The second provides knowledge.

Consider an Indian engineer contributing to an open RISC-V project.

Initially, that engineer might work on a software tool.

Then a compiler optimisation.

Then a driver.

Then hardware verification.

Then an accelerator.

Then perhaps an entire subsystem.

After several years, the engineer has crossed a boundary that previously separated software engineering from hardware engineering.

Multiply that by thousands of engineers.

Now the country has something much more valuable than a collection of imported IP blocks.

It has human capital.

2028 Should Be a Milestone, Not a Deadline

RIGOLETTO's July 2028 completion date is therefore useful as a strategic marker.

India should not wait until July 2028 and ask:

"Can we get the finished technology?"

It should ask today:

"How many Indian engineers can participate before the project finishes?"

The objective should be to emerge from this period with people who understand:

• RISC-V architecture
• processor design
• AI accelerators
• memory systems
• interconnects
• hardware verification
• software-defined systems
• Linux integration
• drivers
• firmware
• hardware security
• automotive and industrial requirements

Then those people can carry that knowledge into industries that European projects may not be targeting directly.

From Cars to Computers

RIGOLETTO is primarily focused on automotive computing.

That does not mean its knowledge has to remain inside automobiles.

A processor architecture does not know whether it is controlling a vehicle or a washing machine.

An AI accelerator does not inherently care whether it is processing automotive sensor data or performing computer-vision inference in a robot.

An interconnect does not care whether it connects automotive subsystems or components in a laptop.

The underlying knowledge can move.

That creates a potential path for India:

European automotive open hardware → Indian engineers → Indian adaptation → Indian consumer hardware.

And the consumer hardware market is enormous.

Gen4 Could Be the Indian Reference Platform

This is where our earlier Gen4 concept becomes less speculative.

Gen4 does not need to begin as an entirely Indian invention.

It could be an Indian integration and evolution of a much larger open ecosystem.

Imagine a platform containing:

• RISC-V CPU cores
• vector processing
• open GPU technology
• NPU acceleration
• hardware video engines
• security hardware
• standard interconnects
• modern memory controllers
• Linux support
• LLVM tooling
• Mesa graphics support
• AI runtimes
• open firmware

The first implementation might use a relatively mature process.

Later implementations could migrate to more advanced nodes.

The architecture and software ecosystem should survive the process transition.

That is the real meaning of "build once, use everywhere."

28nm Does Not Have to Be the End

India's semiconductor journey could therefore look very different from the simplistic race toward the smallest possible transistor.

One possible progression could be:

28nm → mainstream volume computing

22nm/FD-SOI → efficient edge and embedded computing

14/16nm → stronger mainstream computing

7nm → high-performance mainstream and edge computing

The exact nodes and dates will depend on economics, technology transfer, domestic manufacturing capability and international partnerships.

The important thing is that the knowledge accumulated between the nodes does not disappear.

India Should Not Build Everything

This is where the idea connects directly with the earlier doctrine of India Must Learn, Not Just Consume.

Learning does not mean manufacturing every component domestically from day one.

India can use European semiconductor technology.

It can use American EDA tools.

It can use Japanese materials and equipment.

It can use Taiwanese and Korean manufacturing expertise.

It can use global open-source software.

It can participate in RISC-V projects around the world.

None of that is inherently incompatible with technological sovereignty.

The problem begins when India remains permanently unable to understand, modify, maintain or replace the critical layers on which it depends.

Participation changes that equation.

Don't Build From Zero

India often approaches technological sovereignty as if the choices were:

Build everything ourselves or remain dependent on everyone else.

That is a false choice.

There is a third option:

Join the global open technology commons, learn from it, contribute to it and eventually build domestic capabilities on top of it.

That is not dependency.

It is apprenticeship.

And apprenticeship is exactly what India needs in areas where it has historically had less hardware experience.

The Software Engineer Can Become a Hardware Engineer

This may ultimately be the most important consequence.

A young Indian engineer who begins today with Linux, Python, C++, Verilog, simulation or RISC-V does not have to remain a software-only engineer.

Open hardware can provide a gradual path:

software → simulation → RTL → verification → FPGA → ASIC → silicon.

The engineer learns by crossing each boundary.

The knowledge compounds.

Eventually, the distinction between "hardware engineer" and "software engineer" becomes less rigid.

That is precisely the type of hardware-software co-design talent that India will need if its semiconductor manufacturing ambitions are to mature into a complete technology ecosystem.

India's Opportunity Is Not to Copy Europe

India should not attempt to reproduce every European programme.

Europe has its own industrial structure, automotive industry, semiconductor companies, research institutions and strategic priorities.

India has different strengths and requirements.

India has a huge software workforce.

It has an enormous domestic market.

It has a growing electronics-manufacturing ecosystem.

It is building semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

And it has millions of potential developers who could participate in open technology.

The objective should therefore be connection rather than duplication.

Europe Can Be the Classroom; India Can Become a Laboratory

This does not mean Europe teaches and India merely learns.

The relationship should eventually become circular.

India can contribute software.

India can contribute verification.

India can contribute IP.

India can contribute hardware designs.

India can contribute deployment experience.

India can contribute new applications.

India can eventually contribute manufacturing capacity.

And Indian engineers can take what they learn into areas that are particularly important for India:

• affordable laptops
• desktops
• development boards
• smart appliances
• smart meters
• robotics
• automotive electronics
• agricultural technology
• edge AI
• home servers
• industrial automation

The Real Shortcut Is Human Capital

There is a temptation to think of technology transfer as receiving a machine, a licence or a PDK.

But the most valuable technology transfer is often invisible.

It is the engineer who learns why a design failed.

The researcher who learns how an accelerator should be verified.

The developer who learns how hardware should expose an interface to Linux.

The designer who learns how a memory hierarchy affects real workloads.

The team that learns how to turn an academic processor into industrial-grade IP.

Those people carry the knowledge wherever they go.

That is why India's participation should begin before the European projects are finished, not after.

From Participation to an Indian Open Consortium

Eventually, India may still want the larger institution we have discussed before: an open Indian hardware-and-software consortium.

But it should not begin by trying to hire thousands of people and recreate everything from scratch.

It can begin organically.

Indian contributors join international projects.

Indian universities teach the technologies.

Indian companies commercialise components.

Indian researchers develop new IP.

Government funding supports critical open infrastructure.

Those people and organisations gradually form a network.

Eventually, that network can become an Indian open technology consortium.

By then, it would not be an organisation assembled from nothing.

It would be an organisation assembled from experience.

The Larger Vision

Europe's current efforts may therefore represent something larger than European digital sovereignty.

They may be early building blocks of a global open computing ecosystem.

RISC-V provides an open architectural foundation.

Open hardware projects provide reusable IP.

Open PDK initiatives connect designs to silicon.

FD-SOI provides another path toward efficient computing.

Linux and other open-source projects provide the software foundation.

Government projects such as DAWO demonstrate that open technology can extend into real institutional infrastructure rather than remaining a hobbyist exercise.

The pieces are still fragmented.

They are still incomplete.

Some projects will fail.

Some technologies will be replaced.

Some organisations will change direction.

That is normal.

The important thing is that the knowledge and interfaces can remain open enough for the next generation to build upon them.

India Should Be There While the Foundation Is Being Poured

India does not need to wait until the open hardware ecosystem is mature.

It should participate while it is immature.

That is when contributions matter most.

That is when standards are still being shaped.

That is when relationships are being formed.

That is when engineers gain foundational experience.

And that is when India can move from being a future customer to being a present contributor.

By 2028, when RIGOLETTO reaches the end of its current project period, the most valuable Indian outcome should not be a PDF explaining what RIGOLETTO achieved.

It should be a generation of Indian engineers who can say:

"I helped build it."

From Learn to Build

This is the natural continuation of the doctrine:

India Must Learn, Not Just Consume.

Learning does not mean refusing outside technology.

It means using outside technology as a route toward deeper capability.

India does not have to build every foundation alone.

It needs to know which foundations matter, participate in building them, and eventually become capable of extending them independently.

That is why India's semiconductor strategy should not begin and end at the fab.

The fab needs designers.

Designers need IP.

IP needs software.

Software needs hardware interfaces.

Hardware needs verification.

Verification needs tools.

Tools need developers.

Developers need communities.

Communities need sustained funding.

And the entire ecosystem needs products that people actually use.

That is where our earlier Gen4 idea eventually fits: not as an isolated "Indian chip", but as a reference platform demonstrating that open hardware, open software, domestic manufacturing and real-world products can work together.

Own the Ordinary, Rent the Extraordinary

India does not need to win every semiconductor race.

It does not need to manufacture every processor.

It does not need to replace every proprietary application.

It does need to understand the foundations beneath the ordinary technology on which its society depends.

That means learning how to build processors.

Learning how to build accelerators.

Learning how to connect hardware and software.

Learning how to manufacture.

Learning how to maintain open infrastructure.

Learning how to turn research into reliable products.

And learning how to contribute those improvements back to the global commons.

The opportunity emerging in Europe is therefore not something India should watch from the sidelines.

It is a classroom, a laboratory and a community being built in real time.

India should enter while the doors are open.

Not to copy Europe.

Not to become dependent on Europe.

But to learn alongside Europe, contribute alongside Europe and eventually build capabilities that neither India nor Europe could have created as quickly alone.

Because the ultimate goal is not to own every extraordinary technology.

It is to ensure that ordinary technology is never beyond our understanding.

Don't build from zero.

Join the commons. Learn the foundations. Contribute to them. Then build on them.

That is how a software nation can begin becoming a hardware nation.

And that may be one of the fastest routes India has to genuine technological sovereignty.

Beyond Desalination: Designing India’s Sovereign Water and Crop Grid

A follow-up to “What’s Missing Isn’t Water—It’s Vision: Designing India’s Sovereign Crop Grid”

🧭 The Question Has Changed

In September 2025, I asked a relatively simple question: what if India stopped thinking of desalination merely as a way to produce drinking water and started treating it as strategic infrastructure?

The idea was deliberately ambitious. India has an enormous coastline, large areas of water stress, declining groundwater reserves and agricultural regions where the choice of crop is increasingly constrained by water availability.

But there is an important problem with the original argument.

Desalinated water is not free water.

It requires energy, treatment infrastructure, intake and discharge systems, pipelines, pumping, maintenance and capital. Therefore, simply producing desalinated water and sending it into conventional agriculture would often make little economic sense.

That changes the question.

The question is no longer “How can India use desalination to grow more crops?”

The better question is: “Where does a cubic metre of desalinated water create the greatest strategic value?”

That is the beginning of a much more interesting idea: a sovereign water and crop grid.

🌊 Desalination Should Be a Node, Not a Crop Irrigation Scheme

India's coastline is often cited as being around 7,500 kilometres long. More recently, the government has adopted a substantially larger figure of more than 11,000 kilometres following a new GIS-based measurement methodology.

The exact number is less important than the underlying fact: India has an enormous interface with the sea.

That creates an unusual strategic opportunity.

Instead of imagining a desalination plant as a machine whose sole purpose is to produce drinking water, we can imagine it as the centre of a regional water system.

A desalination node could potentially serve:

• municipal drinking water
• industrial water requirements
• high-value agriculture
• protected cultivation
• nurseries and seed production
• aquaculture
• strategic water reserves
• selected ecological restoration projects
• groundwater management where technically appropriate

This is a much stronger model than simply saying, “Let's desalinate seawater and irrigate farms.”

The desalination plant becomes a regional freshwater node.

The surrounding economy is then designed around the availability, cost and strategic value of that water.

💧 What Can 100 MLD Actually Mean?

A 100 MLD desalination plant produces approximately 100 million litres of treated water per day.

That is approximately:

• 100,000 cubic metres per day
• 36.5 million cubic metres per year if operated continuously

At first glance, that sounds enormous.

But agriculture can consume enormous quantities of water as well.

If the same water is used indiscriminately for a thirsty, low-value crop, the economics can quickly become unattractive. The plant may produce millions of cubic metres of water but create surprisingly little additional economic value.

Therefore, the old assumption that a 100 MLD plant automatically equals a fixed number of hectares of farmland should be discarded.

The actual agricultural area depends on:

• crop water requirements
• local rainfall
• soil characteristics
• evapotranspiration
• irrigation efficiency
• mulching and moisture management
• growing season
• salinity
• water losses during distribution

In other words, 100 MLD is a water supply figure, not a farmland figure.

That distinction is essential.

🌾 So Which Crops Should Receive Desalinated Water?

This is where the original “Sovereign Crop Grid” idea becomes more interesting.

We should not simply select crops because they are drought tolerant.

A drought-tolerant crop already has an advantage precisely because it needs less irrigation. Using expensive desalinated water to grow it may not always be the best use of that water.

Instead, crops should be evaluated using several criteria:

• water productivity
• economic value per unit of water
• nutritional or food-security value
• climate resilience
• salinity tolerance
• soil impact
• storage life
• export potential
• employment generation
• strategic importance

This produces a very different crop hierarchy.

🌴 Tier One: High-Value Perennial Crops

Some desalinated water may be most valuable when used to establish long-lived orchards rather than annual field crops.

Dates remain an interesting candidate for parts of western India, particularly regions with appropriate climate and soil conditions.

Date palms have significant tolerance to heat and saline conditions compared with many conventional crops, and the fruit has a high value-to-weight ratio.

But there is an important correction to the original article: dates should not simply be described as a “low-water crop.” Mature date production can require substantial irrigation, depending on climate, soil, density and management.

The argument for dates therefore isn't that they require almost no water.

The argument is that they may generate relatively high economic value from land that has limited conventional agricultural options.

Other fruit and tree crops could also be evaluated depending on location.

The principle is:

Use desalinated water to unlock productive possibilities that would otherwise be severely constrained by local water quality or availability.

🌱 Tier Two: Protected and Controlled Agriculture

This may actually be more important than conventional open-field agriculture.

Greenhouses, shade houses, hydroponic systems and other forms of protected cultivation can dramatically change the relationship between water and crop production.

Instead of applying water across an enormous open field and accepting substantial evaporation and drainage losses, water can be delivered directly to the crop environment.

Potential candidates include:

• vegetables
• leafy greens
• seed production
• nursery plants
• specialty herbs
• high-value flowers
• medicinal and aromatic plants where appropriate

This is where desalinated water begins to make more economic sense.

Instead of spending energy to produce freshwater and then wasting much of its value through inefficient irrigation, the system attempts to extract as much economic output as possible from every cubic metre.

🍄 Mushrooms Are an Interesting Special Case

Mushrooms deserve a place in the discussion because they demonstrate why “agriculture” should not automatically mean large fields.

Mushroom production can take place in controlled environments with relatively small land requirements.

The crop is essentially converting controlled inputs into a high-value food product rather than depending on enormous areas of irrigated soil.

That makes containerised or climate-controlled agriculture an interesting component of a coastal water-and-food industrial cluster.

The same principle applies to seed production and nurseries.

Sometimes the highest-value agricultural use of water is not producing the final food crop at all.

It may be producing the seedlings, planting material or high-value inputs that enable thousands of hectares elsewhere to become productive.

🌾 What About Millets?

Millets remain extremely important—but probably not for the reason we might initially assume.

Millets are attractive because they are relatively drought tolerant and can play an important role in food security and climate resilience.

However, this creates an interesting paradox.

If a region can already grow millet using rainfall or limited freshwater, using expensive desalinated water to grow millet may not be the best economic allocation.

Instead, desalinated water could be used to support the food system around millet.

• seed multiplication
• processing
• storage
• value-added foods
• irrigation during critical drought periods
• soil restoration and crop rotation

In other words, millet may belong in the sovereign crop grid, but not necessarily as the primary consumer of desalinated water.

🌸 What About Saffron?

Saffron is another fascinating example because it has extremely high economic value relative to its physical volume.

Controlled-environment saffron production, including hydroponic or indoor approaches, has attracted interest because it can decouple some aspects of production from traditional geography.

But this does not mean India should build enormous desalination plants simply to grow saffron indoors.

Indoor agriculture has its own energy requirements.

Once again, the correct question is not:

“Can we grow saffron with desalinated water?”

It is:

“Does the complete energy-water-land system produce enough value to justify itself?”

Saffron could therefore be a niche component of the system, particularly where high-value controlled agriculture is already economically justified.

🌵 The Forgotten Category: Salinity-Tolerant Crops

One of the most interesting opportunities may be crops that can tolerate conditions that make conventional agriculture difficult.

Instead of fighting the environment completely, the crop grid could deliberately match crops to environmental conditions.

This could include selected salt-tolerant crops, halophytes, fodder species and other plants suited to marginal environments.

That changes the philosophy of agricultural development.

Rather than asking:

“How do we make this land behave like Punjab?”

we ask:

“What productive ecosystem naturally fits this land?”

That is a much more sustainable starting point.

🌱 Can Desalination Become a Soil Revival Strategy?

This was one of the most provocative ideas in the original article.

And the answer is:

Potentially yes—but not simply by pouring desalinated water onto degraded soil.

Soil degradation has many causes:

• salinity
• sodicity
• erosion
• loss of organic matter
• compaction
• nutrient depletion
• poor drainage
• overgrazing
• repeated monocropping

Water alone cannot solve these problems.

However, reliable freshwater can become one component of a soil-rehabilitation programme.

🧂 The Salinity Problem

This requires particular care.

Irrigation can actually make degraded soils worse if drainage is inadequate. Water evaporates, while salts remain behind. Repeated irrigation can therefore increase salt concentration in the root zone.

Desalinated water is attractive because it begins with very low salinity compared with seawater or many degraded groundwater sources.

But low-salinity irrigation water does not magically remove existing salts.

To reclaim saline soils, water must be combined with appropriate drainage and soil-management practices so that accumulated salts can be moved away from the root zone.

That means a genuine soil-revival project may require:

• freshwater application
• drainage
• soil amendments where appropriate
• organic matter
• salt-tolerant pioneer crops
• mulching
• cover crops
• careful irrigation scheduling
• monitoring of soil electrical conductivity

The desalination plant is therefore not the soil-revival system.

It is one component of the system.

🌿 The Real Soil-Recovery Opportunity

Imagine a degraded agricultural zone where groundwater has become increasingly saline.

A sovereign water project could establish a controlled freshwater supply while simultaneously changing agricultural practices.

Instead of immediately attempting maximum crop production, the first phase could focus on rehabilitation.

1. Map soil salinity and groundwater quality.
2. Improve drainage where required.
3. Use carefully controlled freshwater to manage the root zone.
4. Introduce suitable cover crops and salt-tolerant species.
5. Increase organic matter.
6. Reduce unnecessary soil disturbance.
7. Introduce efficient irrigation.
8. Monitor soil conditions over several seasons.
9. Gradually introduce higher-value crops where the soil recovers.

Now desalination is doing something much more interesting than simply replacing groundwater.

It is helping create a controlled transition from degraded land to productive land.

💧 Water Should Have a Hierarchy

A sovereign water grid should not distribute water equally simply because equal distribution appears fair.

Different sources and qualities of water should have different uses.

A possible hierarchy could look like this:

1. Drinking water and essential public needs
2. Critical drought resilience
3. High-value agriculture
4. Protected cultivation
5. Industrial requirements
6. Soil rehabilitation
7. Lower-value conventional agriculture where other water sources are insufficient

This doesn't mean the poorest farmer should be denied water because a greenhouse produces more money.

It means that the system should recognise that different water uses produce different forms of value.

Food security, employment, ecological recovery, industrial production and export revenue are all legitimate objectives.

A sovereign system should optimise among them rather than pretending they are interchangeable.

⚡ The Energy Question Cannot Be Ignored

There is one issue that the original article did not give enough attention to: energy.

Desalination is fundamentally an energy-consuming process.

Therefore, a serious sovereign desalination strategy must be connected to India's energy strategy.

That creates another interesting possibility.

Coastal desalination nodes could potentially be integrated with:

• solar generation
• wind generation
• grid infrastructure
• energy storage
• industrial demand

Instead of thinking about water and electricity as completely separate infrastructure systems, India could design water-energy-industrial clusters.

Surplus renewable electricity could support water production when economically appropriate, while reliable water could support industrial and agricultural activity.

This is where the idea starts moving beyond agriculture.

🏭 The Coastal Sovereign Water Cluster

Imagine a hypothetical coastal district.

Instead of building a desalination plant in isolation, the region receives an integrated infrastructure node containing:

• a modular desalination plant
• renewable-energy generation
• water storage
• municipal water connections
• industrial water connections
• protected agriculture
• high-value orchards
• soil-rehabilitation zones
• agricultural processing
• cold storage
• food-processing facilities
• water-quality monitoring

Now the desalination plant isn't merely producing water.

It is enabling an economic ecosystem.

This could create jobs not only on farms but in engineering, construction, maintenance, food processing, logistics, research, water management and renewable energy.

🧂 And Then There Is Brine

There is another reason why desalination should not be treated as a magic solution.

Every desalination plant produces concentrated reject water, commonly called brine.

Its management must be part of the project from the beginning.

Coastal location does not automatically mean that brine can simply be discharged into the ocean without consequences.

Outfall design, dilution, local marine conditions, monitoring and environmental regulation all matter.

A sovereign water strategy therefore has to be a water-and-brine strategy.

Waste streams should be treated as engineering problems rather than ignored until the plant is operational.

🗺️ Stop Thinking in Terms of “Desalination Plants Every 150 km”

The original article proposed a conceptual deployment of modular 100 MLD plants at regular intervals along India's coastline.

The idea was useful as a thought experiment, but the better model is now clear.

India should not build desalination plants according to a ruler.

It should build them according to need.

A national water map could identify locations where several conditions overlap:

• severe water stress
• high population growth
• industrial demand
• agricultural potential
• degraded groundwater
• renewable-energy potential
• existing transport infrastructure
• proximity to suitable coastal intake locations
• manageable environmental impact

Those locations become candidates for desalination nodes.

Some nodes may be primarily municipal.

Others may be industrial.

Others may support high-value agriculture.

And some may deliberately be designed around ecosystem and soil recovery.

🌾 The Sovereign Crop Grid

The original idea of a “Sovereign Crop Grid” can therefore be upgraded.

It shouldn't be a list of crops that India wants to grow.

It should be a decision system.

Every region receives a profile containing:

• water availability
• water quality
• soil type
• soil salinity
• rainfall
• temperature
• evapotranspiration
• energy availability
• transport access
• market access
• labour availability
• crop water productivity
• economic value
• food-security value
• ecological impact

The system then recommends a portfolio rather than a single crop.

One region might receive:

• dates
• millets
• fodder
• soil-rehabilitation crops

Another might receive:

• greenhouse vegetables
• seed production
• flowers
• nurseries

A third might receive:

• mushrooms
• controlled-environment crops
• food processing
• cold storage

And another region may receive almost no desalinated agricultural water at all because its existing freshwater can be used more efficiently elsewhere.

🧠 The Principle: Don't Maximise Water Use. Maximise Water Value.

This may be the most important lesson from revisiting the original article.

A successful water strategy should not attempt to consume as much water as possible.

It should attempt to generate the greatest useful outcome from every unit of water.

That outcome could be:

• a litre of drinking water
• a kilogram of food
• a rupee of agricultural income
• a tonne of industrial output
• a restored hectare of degraded soil
• a secure groundwater reserve
• a new job
• a more resilient community

This is why the phrase “water productivity” may ultimately be more useful than “water availability.”

🇮🇳 From Water Security to Sovereignty

There is a larger reason to think about this.

India's future water problem will not necessarily be a simple shortage of water.

It may instead be a problem of timing, geography, quality, energy and allocation.

Rain may fall in one location while another location is experiencing drought.

Groundwater may exist but be too saline.

A city may have sufficient water today but face severe demand growth twenty years from now.

A farmer may have land but lack reliable irrigation.

An industrial cluster may have electricity but insufficient water.

A degraded landscape may have potential but require years of careful rehabilitation.

Sovereignty means having enough infrastructure and institutional capacity to respond to these differences deliberately.

Desalination can therefore be one part of a much larger sovereignty architecture.

🌱 The Bigger Opportunity: Rebuild the Landscape

Perhaps the most interesting version of the original idea is not about producing more agricultural output.

It is about changing what is considered economically possible in water-stressed regions.

Imagine a district that today depends heavily on uncertain rainfall and increasingly stressed groundwater.

Over twenty years, a carefully designed programme could potentially combine:

• desalinated water
• rainwater harvesting
• groundwater monitoring
• efficient irrigation
• soil rehabilitation
• salt-tolerant agriculture
• high-value protected cultivation
• renewable energy
• agricultural processing
• better storage and logistics

The objective would not be to turn the desert into Punjab.

The objective would be to create a productive ecosystem that is appropriate for the desert.

That distinction is crucial.

🔥 What the 2025 Article Got Right

The original article's numbers may have been too optimistic and its crop assumptions too simple.

But its central intuition remains valid:

India should think about water as strategic infrastructure rather than merely as a resource to be consumed.

The mistake would be to interpret that as a justification for massive desalination everywhere.

The stronger interpretation is almost the opposite.

Because desalinated water is expensive and energy-intensive, we should become much more intelligent about where every cubic metre goes.

🧪 The Next Step Should Be Simulation

This idea is now mature enough to be tested rather than merely discussed.

Take one real water-stressed coastal region.

Give it a hypothetical 100 MLD desalination plant.

Then simulate several competing strategies:

1. Conventional field agriculture
2. Millet-based agriculture
3. Date orchard development
4. Protected horticulture
5. Mixed agriculture and soil rehabilitation
6. Municipal-first water allocation
7. Municipal + industrial + agricultural allocation

For each scenario, calculate:

• water consumed
• energy consumed
• capital expenditure
• operating cost
• food produced
• economic output
• employment
• soil condition
• groundwater impact
• carbon impact
• brine-management requirements
• resilience during drought

Only then can we answer the question properly.

Not:

“Can desalination provide enough water?”

But:

“What is the highest-value future we can build with the water we can produce?”

💬 Final Thought

Desalination is not a miracle.

It cannot replace rainfall, eliminate groundwater depletion, repair every degraded soil or make every agricultural crop economically viable.

But it can change the boundary of what is possible.

The real opportunity is not to cover India with desalination plants.

It is to strategically place freshwater production where it can unlock something larger: secure cities, resilient industries, high-value agriculture, productive landscapes and eventually healthier soils.

Perhaps the most important unit in India's future water economy will not be the litre.

It will be the value created per litre.

And that brings us back to the original question.

India may not simply need more water.

It needs a better way to decide what its water is worth.

Learn and Grow, Don't Just Consume

India's groupings — BRICS, the EU, the Quad, or any that follow — must be judged by one question: what do we learn from them?

Context: Four days ago, the 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi — India's fourth turn as chair, under the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The leaders of China, Russia and Iran sat in our capital while our trade deficit with China stands at an all-time high. This essay is about how to hold both of those facts in one head without becoming either a nationalist or a naïf. It is the thesis statement of this entire blog — the piece that says what all the hardware detail was for.

Every discussion of Indian foreign policy eventually becomes an argument about identity. Are we a BRICS power or a Western-leaning one? Are we Global South or a US partner? Are we multi-aligned or fence-sitting? These arguments are unresolvable because they are category errors. A country is not its groupings. A country is what it can make — and make increasingly well with each passing decade.

So this essay proposes a single test to replace all the identity arguments, and then applies it ruthlessly — to BRICS first, because the summit just left town, and then to everyone else.

The test: does this relationship make India learn and grow, or does it only make India consume?

I. The Summit in the Mirror

Start with what actually happened. Eleven full members, ten partner countries, roughly half the world's population represented in the room. The chair's theme — resilience, innovation, cooperation, sustainability — is unimpeachable. And yet the two facts that frame India's relationship with this grouping went unmentioned in the photo-ops.

First: China is not a partner inside BRICS; it is the gravitational center. One country accounts for roughly 70% of the bloc's combined GDP. When BRICS speaks, the mouth is collective but the voice is Beijing's. Second: the economic relationship between India and the grouping's dominant member is not exchange — it is flow. In the fiscal year that just ended, China became India's largest trading partner again, with $151 billion in bilateral trade, and India's exports to China were $19.5 billion while imports were $131.6 billion. The deficit: $112 billion. An all-time high, up from $99 billion the year before, and from $44 billion five years ago.

Trade deficits are not inherently shameful — America ran deficits while building the world's largest economy. But look at what India buys with that $131 billion. It is not consumer trinkets. 98.5% of it is industrial goods. China supplies 43% of India's electronics imports, 40% of its machinery and computer imports, 44% of its organic chemicals — including the active pharmaceutical ingredients our generic drug industry feeds on. These are not purchases. They are dependencies. Each component India imports to assemble into something else is a small lease payment on someone else's capability.

And what flows back? What does India learn from this relationship? Here is the uncomfortable answer, and it is not a moral complaint but an accounting one: nothing that compounds. China sells India finished goods and protected intellectual property, and has never transferred a process technology to India — not one. There is no Chinese Dholera. There is no Chinese-assisted RISC-V program. There is no joint fab venture. The relationship, in strictly industrial terms, is that of a supplier to a customer — and the supplier is careful never to teach the customer to be a competitor. This is not villainy. This is exactly what India would do in China's position. It is simply what the test of "learn and grow" reveals: with respect to the bloc's largest member, India only consumes.

Russia, the other founding anchor, is a different story with the same ending. Historically, the Soviet Union and Russia were India's single greatest source of technology transfer — licensed Su-30 production, the BrahMos joint venture, cryogenic engines before politics intervened. That inheritance deserves respect, and the discount on crude is real money. But look at the direction of travel: Russia's technological base is sanctions-hollowed, its semiconductor industry is generations behind, its flagship co-development projects with India have collapsed or stalled, and its remaining leverage is energy and a Security Council vote. A partner whose technology is depreciating cannot be the pillar of a learn-and-grow strategy, whatever sentimental capital exists. Imports from Russia actually fell this past fiscal year. The market is already answering the question diplomacy has not.

II. The Thesis

Strip the emotion from it and the strategy writes itself:

Reduce the import of things that are finished.
Import, aggressively and from anyone who sells, the things that make things — tools, process knowledge, licenses, know-how.
Do this until no single country holds a chokepoint on India's critical inputs.
Do it with friends, with rivals, with frenemies. The seller's feelings do not matter. The buyer's learning does.

Every country that ever climbed from poor to rich did exactly this, and no country that did the opposite ever did. It is the most consistently successful economic strategy of the last two centuries, hiding in plain sight because each practitioner pretended it was something else — national revival, socialism, self-reliance, open markets. Underneath the ideology, the machine was the same.

III. The Proven Path

Japan, after 1868, sent students and engineers to every Western power with a checkbook and a notebook, bought machines and curricula wholesale, and called the doctrine "Western technique, Japanese spirit." Within two generations it was defeating a Western navy at sea.

Korea, in the 1970s and 80s, was poorer per capita than Ghana. Its champions licensed what they could not invent — Samsung's early DRAM designs licensed from an American firm, Hyundai's memory partnership with Texas Instruments — absorbed the process, and iterated past the teachers. Today Samsung is the teacher, and the licensing flows the other way.

Taiwan, in 1976, sent a government research team to America to bring back CMOS process technology, then did it again at company scale: when TSMC was an unknown startup with no customers and no credibility, Philips of the Netherlands took an equity stake in exchange for technology and manufacturing know-how. That stake, made to help a company no one believed in, became one of the most profitable investments in corporate history — and Taiwan became the indispensable nation of the semiconductor age.

China, from the 1990s, ran "market for technology" joint ventures at industrial scale, required transfer as the price of access, recruited diaspora engineers back by the tens of thousands, and when doors were closed, walked through windows. Its high-speed rail went from imported Kawasaki and Siemens trains to the world's largest domestic industry in fifteen years. Its semiconductor effort took longer and cost more, but the pattern held: the goal was never to buy chips. It was to become a country that makes chipmaking tools.

Notice what is absent from every one of these stories: dogma about groupings. Japan learned from the very powers it distrusted. Taiwan's foundational technology came through a Dutch company. Korea learned from Japan — a former colonizer. China's great technology partner of the 1990s and 2000s was America, its strategic rival. The practitioners of learn-and-grow did not ask whether the seller shared their values. They asked whether the purchase transferred capability. That is the whole of the doctrine, and the rest is commentary.

IV. India's Own Two Stories

India has run this experiment twice, once failing and once succeeding, and the difference between the two runs is the most important policy lesson this country owns.

The failure was the License Raj. From the 1950s, India pursued import substitution as dogma: protect domestic producers from foreign competition indefinitely, and capability would somehow follow. It did not follow. Protected from both competition and consequence, Indian industry had no reason to absorb anything, and the symbol of the era is the Ambassador — a 1956 Morris Oxford produced with minor changes until 2014 — while Japan was building Toyota and Korea was building Hyundai. The lesson is precise and uncomfortable: protection without discipline produces consumption of another kind — the consumption of one's own complacency. India did not fail at import substitution because it protected industry. Korea protected industry more aggressively than India did. India failed because it protected industry unconditionally, asking nothing in return.

The success was ISRO. In the early 1990s, India contracted with Russia's Glavkosmos for cryogenic engine technology — the one piece of the launch vehicle stack India lacked. The United States, enforcing non-proliferation rules, pressured and sanctioned the deal until the technology transfer was killed. India's response was not to find another seller. It was to build the cryogenic engine itself. Twenty years of patient work later, the indigenous upper stage flies routinely. The denial became the forcing function — and this is the deepest insight in the story: a learn-and-grow nation converts even refusal into capability. The sanctions India fought were, in the longest view, the finest technology-transfer program ISRO ever ran.

Between these poles sits Maruti-Suzuki — forty years of joint venture that genuinely transferred manufacturing culture, quality discipline and supplier ecosystems to India, and became the largest carmaker in the country. It proves the other half of the thesis: when a partner does teach, India learns as well as anyone. The problem is never the capacity to learn. It is the discipline to demand it.

V. The Discipline That Makes It Work

East Asia's practitioners added the ingredient India's first attempt lacked: conditionality. Korea and Taiwan gave their champions protection, cheap capital and a captive market — and attached expiry dates and export targets. Firms that failed to learn lost the protection. The state was an investor, not a patron: it bought capability and demanded returns.

Any Indian version — and the sovereign computing ecosystem sketched in this blog's earlier posts would be exactly that — must be built with the discipline wired in from day one. If the government mandates Indian hardware for its employees, that mandate must carry milestones: domestic value-addition that rises on a published schedule, components that localize tier by tier, and eventually, export performance. A mandate without a learning curve is not a strategy; it is the License Raj with better branding. The point of protecting a market is to create the space in which learning happens — and the moment learning stops being the condition of protection, the policy has become its own objective and must be dismantled.

VI. The Three Tiers of Substitution

"Reduce end-product imports" is the right instinct but too blunt a tool, because India's dependency is mostly not end products — it is components. The $131 billion of Chinese imports are overwhelmingly inputs that feed India's own factories. Tariffing them without a plan would simply tariff India's own manufacturing. The strategy therefore has to cut the problem into three tiers, each with its own instrument:

Tier	Examples	Instrument	Time Horizon
End products	Laptops, phones, finished electronics, servers	Substitute directly — domestic SoCs on domestic nodes, government procurement preference, the mandate	2028–2032
Components & industrial inputs	Display panels, PCBs, memory, power ICs, connectors, chemicals	Build domestically tier by tier — fab matures from 55/90nm through 28nm to 22nm FD-SOI; open-silicon IP fills the catalogue	2028–2035
Tools, process & knowledge	EDA licenses, lithography equipment, process transfer, IP licenses, research association, engineering talent	Import aggressively — forever. Never substitute this tier; even the US imports its lithography from the Netherlands and its leading-edge chips from Taiwan	Permanent

The third tier is where dogma does the most damage, in both directions. The protectionist who wants to substitute tools ends up with the Ambassador — a country that makes its own bad versions of yesterday's machines. The free-trader who happily imports finished goods while neglecting tool imports ends up with India's present — a brilliant services economy riding on imported hardware. The first refuses to learn; the second refuses to grow. The synthesis is a nation that buys capability the way a serious company buys R&D: on purpose, with budgets, with absorption plans.

VII. Pragmatic, Not Dogmatic: Groupings as Instruments

Now the question the summit forces: what should India do with BRICS?

The honest answer is that this is a genuinely contested question among serious people, and both camps have real arguments.

The exit camp says: the bloc's largest member dominates it economically, has never transferred a technology to India, actively enables India's principal strategic threat, and the grouping's expansion — Iran's membership, the partner-country category sweeping in Belarus, Cuba, Kazakhstan — tilts it toward the sanctions-resistance club that India has no business cosplaying membership of. Meanwhile, association carries costs: Washington has already threatened hundred-percent tariffs over BRICS de-dollarization talk, and India has trade friction of its own to manage without inheriting bloc baggage. Exit would clarify. Let BRICS become what its center of gravity pulls it toward, and let India stand apart from it.

The engagement camp says: BRICS has no defense clause, no common market, no binding commitments — the cost of the membership is nearly zero, while the chair is worth holding. Exit would hand Global South convening leadership to China outright, removing the one in-room counterweight at precisely the moment India is chairing the table. The forum has delivered things India wants — formal backing for its Security Council aspirations, counter-terrorism language, a development bank — and blocking the bloc's anti-Western framing from inside has value the outside cannot replicate. India's line, in the formulation diplomats actually use, is that BRICS should be non-Western but not anti-Western — and staying is how that line is enforced.

Both camps are arguing about identity. The learn-and-grow test dissolves the argument, because it does not ask whether BRICS is good or bad. It asks: what does India learn here?

Applied honestly, the answer for BRICS today is: little, in industrial terms — nothing from China, nothing from Russia that depreciates slower than it erodes. But not nothing at all: the chair is a stage; the members include Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, the Gulf states and much of Africa — markets, resource partners, and buyers of precisely the finished electronics India will eventually make at Dholera. A pragmatic chairing of BRICS treats the grouping as a sales channel and a diplomatic stage — never as a supplier of capability, because it has none to sell that India should want. That is not friendship and it is not hostility. It is what every serious power does with every grouping: extract the value, refuse the baggage.

And the same test, applied without sentiment to everyone else:

• The European Union — currently the world's densest concentration of learn-and-grow opportunity for India. The FTA is essentially done. Association with Horizon Europe, the €93.5 billion research program, is in formal negotiation. The TTC has explicit semiconductor, HPC, quantum and 6G cooperation tracks. Europe is open-sourcing its public sector onto the very stack this blog has been speccing — Linux, LibreOffice, Nextcloud — and its silicon research (the eProcessor, the 22nm FD-SOI ecosystem) is open-licensed. India should learn from Europe with both hands.
• The United States — the deepest technology pool on earth, the source of EDA tools and the RISC-V ecosystem's commercial muscle, and currently courting India as the counter-China pillar. The learn-and-grow exposure is enormous and the window is open precisely as long as India is seen as a counterweight rather than a competitor. Front-load it.
• Taiwan and Japan — the quietest and most important thread. India's fab exists because of a Taiwanese process transfer (PSMC), and its deepest manufacturing-culture transfer came from a Japanese joint venture (Suzuki-Maruti, forty years running). Both want geographic hedging of their own; both are willing to teach. These are the relationships to deepen without publicity.
• Russia — a relationship to manage with respect and clear eyes: energy at a discount, legacy defense spares, a Security Council vote, and no future in technology transfer. Consume less, sentiment less, and let the arithmetic do the negotiating.

None of this requires choosing a bloc. It requires a spreadsheet.

VIII. The Frenemy Window

One more timing point, and it is the most perishable fact in this essay. India is currently courted by every side at once — the US wants its counterweight, Europe wants its market and talent, Russia wants any market at all, Japan and Taiwan want their hedge. This four-way courtship is a temporary geopolitical condition, not a permanent feature of the world. The historical pattern is unambiguous: the moment a rising power is reclassified from counterweight to competitor, the tool taps get restricted. It happened to Japan in the 1980s and it is happening to China today.

The frenemy window argues for front-loading: sign the process licenses, the research associations, the equipment contracts and the university partnerships now, while every seller has its own reasons to want India to succeed. Capability, once imported, cannot be un-imported — sanctions arrived too late for ISRO's cryogenic engine precisely because the learning had already happened. The same logic, run in reverse, is the whole game: get the knowledge inside the border before the world's mood changes.

IX. What This Looks Like in Silicon

Every post in this series has been an application of this thesis without naming it, so let the thesis name them:

• The Dholera fab is a learn-and-grow transaction — a Taiwanese process transfer that converts a $112 billion component dependency into a domestic capability, tier by tier, node by node.
• The open-silicon catalogue — the CPU cores, the GPU, the NPU, the NVMe and display controllers, every block from the earlier survey — is learn-and-grow in its purest form: technology transfer with no counterparty, no export control, no negotiation. Open source is the one channel where the frenemy question never even arises, which is precisely why it anchors this blog's hardware roadmap.
• The eProcessor relationship — European research, openly licensed, validated on the exact 22nm process generation Dholera will eventually run — is learn-and-grow with a willing teacher, acquired for the price of participation.
• The modular laptop strategy — start at mature nodes, ship a real product, swap the compute module as the fab climbs — is learn-and-grow sequenced for a country: learn on cheap silicon, grow into expensive silicon.
• The Ubuntu + LibreOffice + Nextcloud stack is learn-and-grow software: consume nobody's finished product, adopt everyone's open capability.

The mandate proposed in an earlier post — Indian hardware for Indian government employees — is the demand-side instrument that makes the whole machine turn. But per Section V, it must carry learning curves and expiry dates, or it will be remembered as this generation's License Raj. That is the difference between a sovereign ecosystem and a subsidy farm, and the difference will be decided by whether the discipline is written into the design.

X. The Goal: No Chokepoint, Not Autarky

A final calibration, because "self-sufficiency" is the word that ruins these debates. Literal self-sufficiency does not exist at any level of the technology stack and never has. The United States imports its leading-edge chips from Taiwan and its lithography from the Netherlands. Taiwan imports its equipment from America. Japan imports its rare earths from China. The entire system is a lattice of mutual dependencies; the only question is which dependencies can be weaponized against you.

So the goal must be stated precisely: no single country above roughly 30% of any critical input category. Not zero imports — dispersed imports. Not self-reliance — chokepoint-immunity. A country that cannot be coerced through its supply chain can afford any ideology it likes about its groupings, because the groupings no longer decide anything material. That is the finish line. Everything in this essay is just the route.

The summit has left Delhi. The photographs will be forgotten in a week; the deficit will not. A pragmatic nation does not ask which club it belongs to — it asks what each relationship teaches, and it grades every one of them, every year, on that single question. Learn and grow, or merely consume: that is the whole of the test. India has run both programs before. One gave it the Ambassador. The other gave it a Mars mission for less than the cost of a Hollywood space film. The difference was never ability. It was the refusal to confuse belonging with building.

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Sources and data referenced in this essay: Government of India trade data for FY2025-26 as reported by the commerce ministry (bilateral trade with China of $151.1 billion, deficit of $112.16 billion); Global Trade Research Initiative analysis of DGCI&S data on India-China sectoral dependence; official BRICS 2026 chairship materials (Government of India / PIB) on membership, chairship theme and summit schedule; public reporting on the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, September 12-13, 2026; European Commission releases on the India-EU Trade and Technology Council, the India-EU FTA, and Horizon Europe association negotiations; historical accounts of Japanese industrialization, the Korea-Texas Instruments and Hyundai memory partnerships, the RCA-ITRI technology transfer of 1976-77, the Philips-TSMC investment of 1987, the Glavkosmos cryogenic engine episode and ISRO's indigenous cryogenic program, and the Suzuki-Maruti joint venture. Contested characterizations (including China's dominance of BRICS and the merits of exit versus engagement) are argued positions, presented here as the author's assessment, not established fact.