Key facts
- CII convening forum to project India as a global product power
- Push aims to shift India's tech identity from services to product building
- Forum expected to include industry leaders, investors, and policymakers
- Initiative targets barriers in product design, IP, and global go-to-market
The Confederation of Indian Industry is organising a high-level forum aimed at repositioning India on the global technology map — not as a services provider, but as a builder of world-class products, The New Indian Express reports. The initiative reflects a growing conviction within India's industry establishment that the country has the talent and market scale to move decisively up the value chain in technology.
For decades, India's technology economy has been defined by IT services and outsourcing, delivering software development, testing, and business processes for multinational clients. While this model has generated enormous employment and foreign exchange earnings, it has also meant that India remained largely absent from the higher-margin, higher-recognition business of building globally competitive technology products from the ground up.
The CII initiative seeks to change that narrative. By convening industry leaders, investors, and policymakers, the forum aims to identify structural barriers — from product design culture and intellectual property frameworks to go-to-market support for Indian products globally — and lay out a concrete roadmap for India to emerge as a product nation.
The timing is favourable. A growing cohort of Indian startups are building enterprise SaaS, deep-tech, and consumer technology products that are winning customers in the US, Europe, and South-East Asia. With AI reshaping the global product landscape and India producing a substantial share of the world's AI engineering talent, advocates argue that a coordinated push now could establish India as a genuine product superpower within the decade.