New Delhi, Oct 8 When Prime Minister Narendra Modi first invoked the call for ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) in 2020, the focus was largely on manufacturing, supply chains, and reducing dependence on imports. But in the years since, the initiative has also taken a distinctly digital dimension with India’s ‘Swadeshi apps’ movement emerging as a cornerstone of the country’s digital sovereignty strategy.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah has himself moved to Zoho Mail. This ecosystem of state-backed platforms has created a fertile ground for private Swadeshi apps to thrive. Apart from being patriotic symbols, these apps are designed with India’s unique challenges in mind, with low-bandwidth optimisation, multilingual interfaces, and affordability.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) launched a competition to choose the developer of an indigenous web browser under the Aatmanirbhar Bharat initiative. Zoho emerged as the winner of this ‘Web Browser Development Challenge’, with Team PING and Team Ajna following in that order. Jio Vishwakarma's Multi-Platform Design earned a special mention.
Zoho Corporation’s Arattai has positioned itself as a secure, India-first alternative to WhatsApp.
Many Union ministers have publicly endorsed it, citing its ease of use and local servers. Zoho’s suite – Writer, Sheet, Show, and Mail—provides Indian alternatives to Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
The focus of India’s IT sector, which generates over $282 billion in revenue, is shifting towards creating indigenous hardware and software products. The Swadeshi app movement has not been left to the private sector alone.
Multiple government departments have stepped in to provide infrastructure, funding, and legitimacy. MeitY has promoted platforms like UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-Age Governance) – which integrates over 100 citizen services into a single app – through the Digital India campaign.
In July last year, Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal announced that the company would navigate through its own in-house Ola Maps. “After Azure’s exit last month, we’ve now fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend Rs 100 cr a year, but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in-house Ola maps! Check your Ola app and update if needed,” Aggarwal posted on social media X.
“Also, Ola maps API available on @Krutrim cloud! Many more features coming soon - street view, NERFs, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps etc!” he added. Ola Krutrim is an AI initiative, a large language model (LLM) that can generate responses in multiple languages, including English and Hindi, similar to platforms like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.
Ola Cabs, founded in Bengaluru, itself has expanded to over 250 cities in India and even ventured abroad against stiff competition from similar facilitators like Uber, the American giant.
Again, in navigation, ‘Mappls’ by MapmyIndia offers detailed maps, real-time traffic updates, and rural coverage. Also, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) developed BHIM Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and RuPay have been transformative, reducing reliance on Visa and Mastercard while enabling financial inclusion.
India has also introduced UPI services in countries like Bhutan, France, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the UAE, among others. Reliance Jio’s ‘JioCinema’ and Disney-Star’s ‘Hotstar’ dominate the OTT space, offering regional content at affordable prices.
Additionally, the Health Ministry’s ‘Aarogya Setu’ and ‘CoWIN’ apps became household names during the COVID pandemic, proving that government apps can scale to hundreds of millions of users.
The Agriculture Ministry’s apps like PM-Kisan and eNAM connect farmers directly to markets and subsidies, bypassing middlemen. A government-owned mobile application hosting platform now lists over 1,775 verified Indian apps.
According to the B2B media and information platform for the global app industry, Business of Apps, the Indian app market generated $3.3 billion in revenue in 2023, up from $2.7 billion in 2022.
Policy forum and think-tank Broadband India Forum projects that the app economy could be worth 12 per cent of India’s GDP by 2030, assuming current growth continues. With India’s GDP projected to cross $7 trillion by then, this could mean an app economy worth $800-850 billion.
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