In India, technology innovation is majorly about strategic renaming. There have been some truly remarkable instances lately in India, the kind where you download something open-source, change the logo, give it a patriotic or Sanskritised name, and suddenly it becomes a revolutionary domestic breakthrough. Take the time an open-source browser like Brave was rebranded, relaunched, and celebrated as a major homegrown achievement, reportedly even earning prize money of Rs 75 lakhs in the process. Apparently, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V now qualify as deep-tech R&D.
Then there’s the charming spectacle of institutions buying Chinese Unitree robots, putting them on stage at tech events, and letting the audience gently assume they were engineered in a secret lab somewhere in India. And of course, the proudly “indigenous” BharOS, a closed-source Android-based operating system developed by IIT Madras and funded by the Indian government. It is simply based on GrapheneOS, a free open-source system, but apparently also open to being rediscovered as a national invention. But perhaps the real innovation here is strategic naming.
After all, if you add a patriotic prefix and a dramatic launch event, who could possibly notice the plagiarism?
