Beyond the Back Office: Why India’s $850 Billion Tech Dream Is Really a Reinvention Story 

NITI Aayog’s 2035 roadmap for India’s technology services sector signals far more than quantitative growth from $265 billion to $850 billion; it represents a fundamental identity shift away from the legacy labour-arbitrage model toward an era defined by intellectual property ownership, platform-based delivery, and outcome-driven AI solutions, with agentic AI, full-stack capabilities spanning chips to applications, and India-centred innovation serving as primary accelerators—a transition that recasts Indian engineers from being rented global fixers into architects of sovereign digital infrastructure and intellectual property, positioning the nation not merely as a service provider but as a co-author of the global AI economy, provided it can navigate the formidable challenges of talent retooling at scale, rising protectionism, and the psychological shift from exporting efficiency to exporting invention.

Beyond the Back Office: Why India’s $850 Billion Tech Dream Is Really a Reinvention Story 

By 2035, India’s technology services sector is projected to hit $850 billion. But the number isn’t the story. The strategy is. 

On February 13, 2026, NITI Aayog released a decadal roadmap that, at first glance, reads like a typical growth forecast: India’s tech services industry will scale from $265 billion today to $750–850 billion by 2035. 

But for those who have watched India spend three decades perfecting the art of fixing other people’s software, the fine print reveals something far more radical. This isn’t a projection of “more of the same.” It is an obituary for the labour-arbitrage era, and a declaration of independence. 

To understand why this matters, one has to look past the crores and dollars. The real story of this roadmap is not about getting bigger—it is about growing up. 

The End of the “Body Shopping” Era 

For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the Indian tech worker was synonymous with efficiency, reliability, and… anonymity. The model was simple: Western companies sent specifications east at 5:00 PM, and Indian engineers worked overnight to return clean code by morning. The value proposition was a simple equation: Half the cost, double the manpower. 

It worked. It built Bengaluru. It created the middle class. It funded a thousand startups. But it was a rented throne. 

NITI Aayog’s latest report signals that this throne is being willingly vacated. The target of $850 billion is contingent on a structural shift “from traditional labour-arbitrage arrangements to being predominantly driven by Intellectual Property (IP), platform-driven, and outcome-based services.” 

In plain English: India wants to stop renting out its engineers and start selling what those engineers invent. 

The AI Pivot: From Tool to Co-Pilot 

The elephant in every Indian boardroom right now is Generative AI. Historically, automation scared the IT sector because it threatened to replace the “coder.” The new roadmap reframes AI not as a threat, but as the very engine of growth. 

The report highlights “agentic AI”—systems that don’t just generate text or code, but act autonomously to achieve goals—as a key driver. For India, this is a massive hedge. If the world needs fewer junior developers to write boilerplate code, India must ensure that its senior developers are the ones building the platforms that write the code. 

This is already happening beneath the headlines. Major Indian system integrators are no longer just implementing Salesforce or SAP; they are building industry-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on the dusty, analogue datasets of global manufacturing, banking, and healthcare. They are creating digital twins of factories in Pune for clients in Detroit. 

The roadmap suggests that by 2035, the “service” in technology services will be defined not by hours logged, but by outcomes improved—reduced fraud, faster drug discovery, optimized supply chains. 

The Full-Stack Gambit 

Perhaps the most audacious aspect of the roadmap is what it reveals about India’s “full-stack AI strategy.” The document explicitly calls out ambitions spanning infrastructure, chips, models, and applications. 

This is a geopolitical and economic pivot. For decades, India imported hardware and exported talent. The new vision posits India as a parallel computing civilization—not necessarily competing with Silicon Valley on bleeding-edge semiconductor fabrication tomorrow, but certainly designing the chips, training the models, and owning the user interface for a significant portion of the Global South. 

India is effectively saying: We will not just consume the AI revolution; we will host it. 

This involves everything from sovereign cloud infrastructure to India-specific foundational models that understand Dravidian languages or the logistics of an unorganized retail market. The technology services sector is the transmission belt for this ambition—taking research from the lab and stress-testing it in the messy, chaotic reality of Indian industry. 

The “India-Centred” Advantage 

One of the most intriguing phrases buried in the report is the focus on “India-centred solutions.” For years, “global capability centres” (GCCs) in India were designed to serve headquarters in New York or London. The new roadmap flips the telescope. 

India is now a petri dish. The country’s scale—its 1.4 billion people, its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) handling 10 billion transactions a month, its rapid digitization of health and education—creates a unique laboratory. 

Solutions designed for India’s complexities (identity management, mobile-first commerce, multilingual interfaces) are increasingly exportable. The roadmap identifies this as a core growth vector. Companies no longer just come to India to save money; they come to see how technology behaves when deployed at planetary scale with severe constraints. This “frugal innovation” capability is becoming India’s unique IP. 

Employment: The Unspoken Tightrope 

NITI Aayog is clear that this growth path is tied to the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, with an emphasis on “generating substantial employment opportunities.” 

However, this is the tightrope walk. The shift from labour-arbitrage to IP-led growth is value-accretive, but it is not always labour-accretive—at least not in the traditional sense. A factory needs thousands of hands; a platform-as-a-service company needs hundreds of engineers and a sales team in London. 

The roadmap implies a qualitative shift in employment. The demand will not be for engineers who know Java, but for architects who understand cloud economics; not for support staff, but for prompt engineers and domain specialists. 

This raises a human capital challenge. India produces millions of graduates, but the employability gap remains wide. The “skill-based hiring” movement and the government’s focus on AI literacy are attempts to bridge this gap. The success of the $850 billion vision hinges on whether India can convert its demographic dividend from a headcount advantage into a cognitive advantage. 

Beyond Services: The Product Whisperer 

The roadmap explicitly calls out “software and products” as a growth pillar. This is the emotional core of the reinvention. 

There is a historical trauma in the Indian tech narrative: the inability to produce a Microsoft, a Google, or a Salesforce. Every few years, a wave of hype declares the “Year of the SaaS Unicorn,” but the ecosystem has remained largely services-driven. 

However, the line between services and products is blurring. The most successful SaaS companies today are not purely product companies; they are “services-ware.” They embed deep domain consulting into their software. This plays to India’s strength. Indian engineers understand the implementation of enterprise software better than anyone else because they have been doing it for global clients for 30 years. 

NITI Aayog’s forecast suggests that by 2035, the distinction will be moot. Indian firms will sell outcomes—a fully managed AI supply chain, a compliance-as-a-service platform—which are neither pure services nor pure products. They are “solutions,” and the value capture will remain in India. 

The Infrastructure Layer 

The roadmap identifies “digital infrastructure” as a growth driver. This is not just about laying fibre. It refers to the stack beneath the applications. 

India has proven its mettle in building public digital infrastructure (the India Stack). The next phase involves privatized, specialized infrastructure for global industry. This includes sovereign cloud for European banks, blockchain networks for global trade finance, and edge computing nodes for smart manufacturing. 

Indian technology services firms are uniquely positioned to build and operate this middleware. They are trusted by the largest balance sheets in the world, and they are increasingly viewed as strategic partners rather than vendors. Owning the infrastructure layer ensures recurring revenue and elevates the pricing power of the Indian tech sector. 

The Road Ahead: Three Critical Tests 

While the NITI Aayog roadmap is a vote of confidence, the journey to 2035 will require navigating three distinct hurdles: 

• Talent Retooling at Scale: Upskilling 5 million existing engineers in AI/ML and system architecture is a logistics problem of wartime proportions. The private sector must partner with educational institutions to rewrite the curriculum in real-time. 

• Global Protectionism: As India moves up the value chain, it will encroach on turf traditionally held by Western incumbents. This could invite regulatory friction, visa restrictions, and data localization laws that work against Indian exporters. India’s trade diplomacy will need to be as agile as its tech sector. 

• The Risk of Complacency: The biggest risk is mistaking the forecast for the strategy. The $850 billion figure is not destiny; it is a ceiling that requires aggressive R&D spending, venture capital depth, and regulatory speed. India’s share of global tech patents remains minuscule. Closing that gap is essential. 

Conclusion: The Confidence to Build 

The most telling phrase in the IBEF report is not the revenue target; it is the statement that India aims to be “a leader in AI-enabled systems and digital platforms, rather than only as a global service provider.” 

The word “only” carries the weight of three decades. 

For a long time, India’s tech story was one of gratitude—gratitude for outsourced contracts, for H-1B visas, for foreign investment. The NITI Aayog roadmap signals that the era of gratitude is over. It has been replaced by the era of ownership. 

The technology services sector of 2035 will look nothing like the one of 2026. It will be populated by firms that generate revenue from software licenses, from AI inference fees, from intellectual property royalties. The engineer will still be at the centre of the story—not as a pair of hands, but as the architect. 

The $850 billion is just the scoreboard. The real win is the shift in identity.