This is a political history of the emergence and spread of computing in India, from the country’s independence in 1947 until recent times, and some of its social consequences. Most of the book focuses on the deliberations and decisions of India’s political, scientific, engineering, and business elites. This process, as Michael Homberg shows convincingly, can only be understood in a broad international context. India’s leaders were convinced that the key to the country’s development was technological advancement, which required training scientists and engineers, and investment in high technology companies and infrastructure. In a poor country such as India, capital and knowledge had to come, initially at least, from the richer parts of the world. Therefore, technology policy had to navigate the global power struggles of the Cold War, the rise of the ‘Third World’, and in the later 20th century the rise of neoliberalism and globalisation. Homberg deftly situates Indian technology politics in this complicated field of forces. The main story of Indian development is regularly interrupted for substantial and well-informed excursions into topics such as national and international development organisations, international labour migration, and discussions about a ‘new world information order’—among many topics. Homberg also discusses, in depth, key concepts that shaped these policies (as well as historical interpretations), such as modernity, sovereignty, the knowledge society, and globalisation.

The analysis centres on the Indian elites’ efforts at swadeshi to transform the ex-colony into a self-reliant, wealthy, highly educated nation. This was to be achieved by state planning based on massive demographic and economic data, which could only be processed with modern computers. Thus, the computer became the ultimate ‘swadeshi machine’ in the eyes of the elites. Ironically, this western-inspired technocratic approach fostered new forms of dependence on western capital and technology.

Swadeshi implied independence of both the capitalist and the communist blocs while cultivating friendly relations with both. How successful this could be, was shown in the founding and flourishing of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the engineering schools that were founded between 1950 and 1963. The Western powers and the Soviet Union were eager to support India in order to capture its enormous potential market as well as to secure its support in the Cold War. Each IIT therefore received copious support from either the United States, Britain, The German Federal Republic, or the Soviet Union. Recruiting their students from India’s upper classes, these institutes educated the (practically all-male) new elites who would be the backbone of India’s modernisation. An unexpected consequence was that the IITs soon became the source of an enormous ‘brain drain’, especially to the United States. In the 1990s, 75 percent of the computer science graduates emigrated to the US. An Indian academic wrote in 1984 that the IITs were India’s most generous gift to the United States.

In the early 1970s, Indira Gandhi’s government attempted to curb and regulate the power of foreign companies and stimulate domestic ones. It expanded trade relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, alienating the United States and western companies. Among the latter was IBM, which left the country. This was one cause of the stagnation of computer development in India, in addition to grave political turmoil, excessive bureaucracy, and a defective electricity network. The tide only turned when Indira’s son Rajiv took over in 1984 and reversed these policies, joining the international turn to neoliberalism, and encouraging international cooperation. IBM and other companies returned to India. Although his politics were different, Rajiv, like his mother and grandfather, regarded technological advance as India’s royal road to prosperity. Together with his advisors (entrepreneurs and scientists known as the ‘computer boys’) he stimulated the development of the ‘Electronic City’ Bangalore, an attempt to imitate Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Bangalore’s IT services came to serve organisations around the world: the one computer-related business in which India truly became a world leader. Some Indian IT experts became entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, a few of them successfully, others returned to their country to work there in business or at a university, and thousands performed low-paid back-office jobs for companies around the world. In all, Homberg concludes, the dream of national independence via computing had been transformed into participation of Indian workers in global networks.

As to the social consequences of this development, Homberg emphasises the very uneven distribution of the profits of the IT business, contradicting expectations that computers and the internet would be great levelers. One chapter is devoted to the complicated lives of Indians working abroad, especially in Silicon Valley and in Berlin.

This brief sketch cannot do justice to the rich panorama of forces and counterforces described in this book. For example, there were frequent protests, especially during the 1970s, by labour unions, which feared unemployment as a result of automation, and the harmful influence of western capitalism (one union leader said: the villages now have Coca Cola but no drinking water). Rather than telling a unilinear story, Homberg shows debates over alternative courses India could take. A much-debated alternative was to develop simple technologies that were directly useful to the common people, rather than the expensive high-tech projects—computing, nuclear weapons, spaceflight—that obsessed the elites. Mohandas Gandhi’s famous treatise “Hind Swaraj” (1908), later developed into a theory of ‘appropriate technology’ was often referred to in this connection. But India’s development also raises the question why other Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South-Korea, did achieve the technology-based (relative) independence that Indian elites strived so hard to achieve. Explaining this difference is still on the agenda, writes Homberg (p. 488, footnote 19). An excellent starting point, I suggest, is James Cortada’s “The Digital Flood” (2012). Homberg correctly criticizes this book’s claim that Indian elites until the 1990s were ignorant and ineffectual in their response to computing. Yet Cortada’s much wider-ranging analysis of the differences between Asian countries merits critical elaboration, and no one would be better equipped for this than Michael Homberg.