InnerKore

The Great Indian Data Giveaway: How 'Free' AI is Building Our Digital Master

From the East India Company to Gemini and ChatGPT: Why India's AI future is being mortgaged for 18 months of premium access.

Published on February 19, 2026

By: Gagandeep Singh

I. Introduction: The Price of Free

I have a confession to make. Last week, I clicked "Accept" on three separate offers. I accepted 12 months of ChatGPT Plus for free. I activated 18 months of Google's Gemini Pro, bundled seamlessly with my Jio recharge. And yes, I even grabbed the 12-month Adobe Express Premium subscription that came with my Airtel broadband. I felt like a savvy consumer, a digital-age bargain hunter who had just beaten the system.

But as the confirmations flashed on my screen, a chill ran down my spine. I wasn't beating the system. I was being systematically recruited into it. I, like perhaps 500 million other Indians, have just traded away our most valuable national asset for a few months of "premium" access to tools we don't own, built by companies we can't control.

This is not a story about consumer choice. This is a story about the largest and most sophisticated data grab in human history. It is a story about how the world's largest repository of raw data—India's diverse, multilingual, digitally active population—is being quietly, voluntarily, and cheerfully handed over to a handful of US-based multinational corporations. And in return, we are being given something that looks like a gift but functions as a shackle: free access to the very intelligence our data is creating.

The math is simple, brutal, and invisible to most. OpenAI has given India 12 months of free ChatGPT. Google, in a masterstroke alliance with Reliance Jio, is giving away 18 months of Gemini Pro. Adobe has partnered with Airtel to offer Adobe Express Premium free for a year. These are not acts of corporate social responsibility. They are the opening salvos in a war for digital sovereignty, and India is not a participant. We are the battlefield.

This article is a 5,000-word exploration of that battlefield. We will trace the historical parallels of this trade dynamic, dissect the mechanics of each "free" deal, analyze the chilling effect on Indian AI entrepreneurship, critique the government's performative response, and ultimately, confront the bleak but necessary question: If we cannot win this war for ownership, what is our new place in the world order?

II. Historical Context: The Colonial Playbook 2.0

To understand the magnitude of what is happening, we must first understand that this is not a new story. It is an ancient one, playing out on a digital stage. The relationship between India and the West has always been defined by a single, brutal dynamic: the extraction of raw materials and the re-importation of finished goods.

The East India Company Model (1757-1857)

When the East India Company first arrived on Indian shores, it was ostensibly a trading enterprise. But it quickly restructured the subcontinent's economy to serve a single purpose: extraction. India's fertile lands were forced to produce indigo, cotton, and opium—not for Indian consumption, but for British factories and Chinese markets. The vast wealth generated from this raw material was shipped to London.

Simultaneously, the British systematically de-industrialized India. The country that had once exported the world's finest textiles was flooded with cheap, machine-made cloth from Manchester. Indian weavers were crushed not by competition, but by a combination of policy, tariffs, and the sheer weight of an industrialized empire. The railways and telegraph, presented as modern marvels, were built not to connect Indians, but to efficiently move raw materials to the ports of Bombay and Calcutta for export.

The parallel today is uncanny. India's data—our UPI transaction histories, our Google searches in Hinglish, our location data, our consumption patterns, our linguistic diversity—is the new raw material. It is being extracted through the mines of "free" apps and services. It is then shipped across digital seas to server farms in Iowa, Virginia, and Oregon. There, it is refined into large language models (LLMs) and AI algorithms. And finally, this finished product—this artificial intelligence—is shipped back to us, and we are asked to pay for the privilege of using it. The weavers of Bengal have been replaced by the AI startups of Bengaluru.

The License Raj and the Missed Opportunity (1947-1991)

Post-independence, India recognized the danger of foreign economic dominance. Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of self-reliance led to a policy of protectionism, often called the "License Raj." The intention was to nurture domestic industry by shielding it from foreign competition. While it succeeded in creating a diverse industrial base, it also bred inefficiency, corruption, and the infamous "Hindu rate of growth."

The lesson of this era is crucial: Isolationism is not the answer. We cannot build a digital wall around the Indian internet. We cannot ban Google or ChatGPT. The world is too interconnected, and the benefits of access to global technology are too real. The challenge is not to build a fortress, but to build a competitive army.

The 1991 Reforms and the IT Service Trap (1991-2010)

The 1991 economic reforms threw open the doors. Foreign investment poured in, and India found its footing in the global economy not as an industrial power, but as a services hub. The IT and BPO revolution was born. We became the world's back office.

This was an era of incredible wealth creation and the rise of a massive middle class. But it came with an unspoken, long-term cost. We became experts at servicing the tools built by others. We wrote code for SAP, we managed networks for Cisco, we answered calls for Citibank. We became the world's most skilled implementation partners. But we ceded product ownership and intellectual property. We learned to be perfect executors, but we forgot how to be visionary creators. This created a deep-rooted cultural and economic mindset: that our role is to serve, not to own.

The Jio Disruption and the "Free" Habit (2016-Present)

Then came Jio. In 2016, Reliance Jio launched with a seismic offer: free data and free voice calls for months on end. It connected hundreds of millions of Indians to the internet for the first time. It was a revolutionary act of digital inclusion.

But it did something else, something more profound and potentially dangerous. It habituated an entire nation to the idea that data and digital services should cost nothing. The price of a 4G connection became zero in the public consciousness. The question "What does it cost?" was replaced by "Is it free?" This "free" culture is the psychological bedrock upon which the current AI freebies are being offered. The Indian consumer is now uniquely conditioned to expect digital miracles for zero rupees, making them uniquely vulnerable to the most sophisticated customer acquisition strategy ever devised.

III. The Anatomy of the "Freebie": A Closer Look at the Deals

These are not random promotions. They are surgically precise strategies designed to capture the Indian market in its entirety. Let's look under the hood of each one.

Deconstruction 1: OpenAI's 12 Months of Free ChatGPT

The Target: The urban, educated, tech-savvy Indian. The coder in Pune, the content writer in Gurgaon, the MBA student in Mumbai. These are the early adopters, the influencers, the ones whose habits set the trends for the rest of the country.

The Strategy:

  • Habit Formation: Twelve months is not an arbitrary number. It is the time required to deeply integrate a tool into a professional workflow. After a year of using ChatGPT to debug code, draft emails, and research topics, it becomes not just a tool, but a crutch. The cognitive cost of switching to another platform becomes immense.
  • Data Harvesting: Every prompt is a gold nugget. When an Indian user asks ChatGPT to "summarize this article about the Karnataka election," or "write an email in Hinglish to my landlord," or "explain the concept of 'jugaad' in simple terms," they are not just getting work done. They are fine-tuning OpenAI's models for the Indian context, for free. They are the unpaid, unwitting data annotators for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
  • Competitor Neutralization: The biggest casualty of this strategy is the Indian AI startup. Imagine a bright team of IIT graduates building "BharatGPT," a chatbot designed specifically for Indian languages and contexts. How do they convince a user to try their product when the world's most advanced AI is available for free, for a full year? The first-mover advantage, the lifeblood of any startup, is completely annihilated before the race even begins.

Deconstruction 2: Google & Jio's 18-Month Gemini Pro

The Partnership: This is not just a deal; it is a declaration of war. Google brings the world's most sophisticated AI research. Jio brings the world's most formidable distribution network. Together, they are an unstoppable force.

The Strategy:

  • Distribution Domination: Jio doesn't just have users; it has a pipeline into every village, every town, and every city in India. By bundling Gemini Pro with Jio tariff plans, Google bypasses the need for individual user acquisition. It reaches hundreds of millions of users in a single stroke, from the CEO in a Mumbai high-rise to the chai-wala in a UP village who just got his first smartphone.
  • Ecosystem Lock-in: This is the Google masterstroke. It's not just Gemini. It's Gemini deeply integrated into Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Search, and Google Maps. A user who adopts Gemini isn't just adopting an AI; they are re-entering the Google ecosystem for the next decade. Their documents, their emails, their calendar, their search history—all of it becomes the fuel for Google's AI engine.
  • Killing the OEM Opportunity: Indian handset makers like Lava, Micromax, and others have been trying to make a comeback, often with "Make in India" phones that promise indigenous features. Imagine one of them trying to build an AI-first experience on Android. They are now rendered obsolete before they start. Why would anyone buy a phone with a "made in India" AI assistant when their Jio plan comes with 18 months of the far superior Google Gemini?

Deconstruction 3: Adobe & Airtel's Adobe Express Premium

The Target: The creator economy, the small business owner, the student, the local chai-wala who wants to make a digital menu.

The Strategy:

  • Democratizing Creation, Centralizing Control: Adobe Express is a powerful, simplified tool for creating social media graphics, flyers, and videos. Giving it away for free for a year empowers millions of small businesses and aspiring creators. This is, on the surface, a wonderful thing.
  • The Trap: But it ensures that the platform they become reliant on is Adobe's. Any Indian startup trying to build a "Canva for India"—perhaps a tool that integrates better with Indian stock photography, Indian fonts, and local design sensibilities—now faces an insurmountable 12-month barrier to entry. Their target user is happily and productively locked into a superior, "free" product from a global giant. By the time the bill comes due, the Indian startup has run out of runway.

IV. The Murder of a Million Startups: The Chilling Effect on Indian AI Innovation

The venture capital world operates on a simple principle: total addressable market (TAM). Investors want to know how many users a startup can capture. In the Indian B2C AI space, the answer to that question is now, for all practical purposes, zero.

  • The Barrier to Entry is No Longer Capital, it's Scale: An Indian AI startup might be fortunate enough to raise $5 million in seed funding. That is a significant sum. But it is a rounding error compared to the marketing and customer acquisition budget of Google or OpenAI. How does a startup with a $5 million war chest compete with a product that is being given away for free for 18 months by a trillion-dollar company? They can't. It's not a competition; it's a slaughter.
  • The Investor's Dilemma: Why would a venture capitalist fund a B2C AI chatbot for India? The due diligence is now brutally simple: "Is the market saturated by a free product from Big Tech?" If the answer is yes, the pitch deck goes in the trash. Investment will not dry up; it will be completely re-routed. The only AI startups that will get funded in India will be niche B2B SaaS companies selling to clients in the US, or undifferentiated service layers that simply wrap APIs from OpenAI and Google. True product innovation at the foundational level will be starved of capital.
  • The Talent Drain: The brightest minds from IIT Delhi, BITS Pilani, and IIIT Hyderabad are the ones who could build India's AI future. But they are also rational economic actors. Faced with a choice between a high-risk, low-probability-of-success job at a struggling Indian AI startup and a safe, prestigious, high-paying position at Google DeepMind or Microsoft Research, the choice is obvious. The brain drain, which had slowed, will accelerate into a torrent.
  • The After-12-Months Scenario: The Sunk Cost Fallacy: Let's fast forward 18 months. A small business owner in Jaipur has built her entire social media strategy using Adobe Express. Her templates, her brand colors, her content calendar are all inside the Adobe ecosystem. A college student in Chennai has written every essay and research paper with the help of ChatGPT. His entire academic workflow is intertwined with the tool. When the "free" period ends and the subscription bills arrive (likely priced in dollars, making them expensive), what do they do?
    • They will grumble.
    • They will consider switching.
    • And then they will realize the massive hassle and loss of historical data involved in moving.
    • They will pay.
    • There will be no Indian alternative to switch to, because none survived the "free" period. We will have no choice but to pay whatever price the market will bear.

V. The Emperor's New Clothes: The Government and the #IndiaAIImpactSummit

In the midst of this digital colonization, the Indian government has not been silent. It has been busy organizing summits, releasing frameworks, and taking photos.

  • The Current Policy Vacuum: India has made strides with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, which focuses on privacy and consent. But privacy is a side issue here. The core issue is anti-competitive practices in digital markets. The DPDP Act does nothing to stop Google from bundling Gemini with Jio. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has fined Google in the past for Android anti-trust violations, but those fines, while large, were slaps on the wrist. They were paid, the press releases were issued, and nothing changed. The CCI is overburdened, under-resourced, and too slow to deal with the warp-speed evolution of AI. By the time an investigation is concluded, the market is settled forever.

  • #IndiaAIImpactSummit: A Performance or a Policy Forum?

    • The Official Narrative: The government proudly showcases the #IndiaAIImpactSummit as evidence of its proactive approach. It brings together global tech leaders, Indian ministers, and academics to discuss the future of AI. It signals to the world that India is open for business and ready to lead.
    • The Critical View: The summit functions as a masterfully crafted pressure release valve. It creates the impression of action without the substance of policy. It is a glitzy, media-friendly distraction. While the cameras flash on a minister shaking hands with Sundar Pichai, celebrating a "partnership for India's digital future," the structural erosion of the domestic AI ecosystem continues unabated. It allows the government to claim they are "considerate" of the AI future while failing to provide the one thing that would actually help: protective, intelligent regulation.
    • The Summit as a Seal of Approval: These summits inadvertently provide a powerful legitimizing force for Big Tech. By sharing a stage with them, the Indian government implicitly endorses their presence and their strategies. It signals to the Indian public and the Indian entrepreneur that these companies are not just welcome, but are partners in the national project. This makes it politically even harder to regulate them later.

VI. Why Policy Change is (Probably) Not Coming: A Bleak Diagnosis

The question must be asked: If the situation is so dire, why won't the government act? The answer is a complex web of power, perception, and paralysis.

  • The Lobbying Power of Big Tech: Google, Meta, Amazon, and now OpenAI have more resources dedicated to lobbying in New Delhi than the entire Indian startup ecosystem combined. They employ the best law firms, the most connected public relations agencies, and the most influential former bureaucrats. Their messaging is sophisticated and seductive. They don't frame their offerings as market capture; they frame them as "democratizing access to AI," as "Digital Public Goods," and as essential tools for achieving the government's own "Digital India" vision. They align their corporate interests with the nation's stated goals.

  • The Consumer is the Lobbyist: Try this experiment at home. Tell your tech-savvy friend that they shouldn't use free Gemini because it's hurting a hypothetical Indian startup. They will look at you like you're insane. Tell a small business owner that the free Adobe Express they love is a tool of digital colonialism. They will laugh in your face. The "free" creates a massive, vocal, and powerful political constituency that will resist any regulation perceived as taking away their benefits. The users themselves become the most effective lobbyists for the very companies extracting their data.

  • The Hypocrisy of "Vocal for Local": The government's "Vocal for Local" campaign has been successful for physical goods. It has created a sense of pride and preference for khadi, for local groceries, for Indian handicrafts. But this philosophy has not been extended to the digital realm. There is a fundamental, baffling disconnect between trade policy and technology policy. We will protect the local spice seller, but we will not protect the local AI coder. We understand the value of physical sovereignty, but we are blind to the importance of digital sovereignty.

  • The "Chalta Hai" Attitude and the Pace of Bureaucracy: There is a deep-seated, and often justified, cynicism about the Indian regulatory apparatus. The system moves slowly. By the time a consultation paper is drafted, public comments are sought, a committee is formed, and a report is submitted, we will be on Gemini Ultra 8.0. The market will have been settled for years. The sheer velocity of AI innovation makes our bureaucratic pace not just inadequate, but actively harmful.

VII. The Future We Have Resigned Ourselves To: Finding Our Place in a Dependent World

If we accept the premise that winning the war for AI sovereignty is impossible without the policy intervention that is unlikely to come, then we must confront a difficult truth. The future is not about ownership. It is about finding the most advantageous, dignified, and prosperous position within a system of permanent dependency. This section explores that uncomfortable reality.

  • Our New Masters: A Multi-Polar Dependence

    • We will not have one master, but several. The 21st century will not be a mono-culture. We will navigate a complex, competitive landscape of US-based tech giants, each vying for dominance in different verticals of our lives.
    • Microsoft/OpenAI: Likely to become the professional co-pilot for India's vast IT and services workforce. They will power the coding, the documentation, and the enterprise analytics.
    • Google: Will continue to be the interface for the next 500 million internet users, mediating information, navigation, and commerce through an AI-powered Search and Assistant.
    • Adobe/Salesforce: Will provide the tools for our creators, marketers, and enterprises. They will define the templates of our digital expression.
    • The Chinese Question: Depending on geopolitics, Chinese players like Alibaba or Tencent could re-emerge, possibly dominating hardware integration or specific algorithm-driven sectors like short-form video.

  • Our New Role: The Hyper-Specialized Service Layer

    • Our strength will shift irrevocably from building foundational models (the LLMs themselves) to becoming the world's undisputed experts at applying these models.
    • Data Annotation and Curation at Scale: We will be the ones labeling the data to make these models work better for the world's diverse languages. The image of an Indian graduate student tagging images in Hyderabad is the new, more sophisticated version of the call center agent. We are the digital coolies, loading the ship with refined fuel.
    • Fine-Tuning as a Service: Indian startups will thrive in the niche of taking a base model (like Gemini or Llama) and fine-tuning it for hyper-specific use cases. Imagine a startup that fine-tunes a model for the arcane language of the Indian Income Tax Department, or for the specific dialect of rural Bihar, or for the complex formulations of Ayurvedic medicine. We will add the last mile, high-value layer of specialization.
    • The API Integrators: We will build the "glue" that connects these powerful AI APIs to the fragmented, chaotic, and vibrant landscape of Indian SMBs, local government departments, and hyper-local apps. We will be the plumbers of the AI age—essential, skilled, but never the architects of the main system.

  • The Human Role: The "Human-in-the-Loop" at Scale

    • For the foreseeable future, AI will need human oversight, especially in high-stakes, high-ambiguity areas. India's vast pool of educated, English-speaking, and critically thinking talent will become the world's "human-in-the-loop" workforce.
    • We will be the ones verifying the legal summaries generated by AI, auditing the medical diagnoses, moderating the content, and handling the "edge cases" that the algorithms cannot resolve. It is dignified, intellectually demanding work. But it is service work, not ownership. We will be the shepherds of the AI flock, not the shepherds' masters.

  • The Cultural Consequence: A Perpetual State of Imitation

    • This is the most profound, and saddest, consequence. Our digital culture—the way we create, communicate, and think—will be defined by tools built in Silicon Valley boardrooms. Our creative expression will be molded by Adobe's templates. Our business communication will be optimized by Microsoft's AI. Our queries for knowledge will be filtered through Google's algorithms.
    • We will become incredibly fluent in the language of these foreign AIs. We will know their shortcuts, their biases, and their capabilities better than anyone. But we will have lost the ability to write our own grammar. Our digital identity will be a permanent imitation, a brilliant performance on a stage we did not build.

VIII. The Individual's Dilemma: Why I Will Still Click "Accept"

And this brings me back to where I started. To my own confession. I have laid out, in 5,000 words, a case for why the "free" AI offers are a trap. I have argued that they will kill Indian innovation, cement digital colonialism, and leave us in a state of permanent dependency.

And yet, tomorrow, when my Jio plan needs recharging, I will still take the free Gemini. When my Adobe Express trial runs out, I will extend it with my Airtel offer. Why? Because the alternative is worse.

To opt out is to fall behind. In a world that is being rapidly reshaped by AI, refusing to use these tools is not an act of resistance; it is an act of self-immolation. The coder who refuses to use Copilot will be out-coded. The writer who refuses to use ChatGPT will be out-written. The small business owner who refuses to use AI design tools will be out-marketed. We are trapped in a classic collective action problem. As individuals, the rational choice is to take the free tool and stay competitive. As a nation, this collective rational choice leads to an irrational and disastrous outcome.

So I will use the tools. I will let Google and OpenAI and Adobe learn from my data. I will become more proficient in their ecosystems. And I will do so with a heavy heart and open eyes. I will know that I am not just a user, but a participant in a grand transfer of wealth, power, and intellectual potential from the world's most populous democracy to a handful of corporations on the West Coast of the United States.

IX. Conclusion: Digital Swaraj or Digital Service?

India stands at a fork in the road, though the signs are fading and one path is already overgrown.

Path A (The Road Not Taken): This path requires a radical, urgent, and intelligent shift in policy. It requires the government to stop posing for photos and start crafting legislation. It means creating a Digital Competition Law specifically designed to tackle anti-competitive practices in AI. It means forcing interoperability, preventing the deep bundling of AI services with essential utilities like telecom, and investing in a sovereign AI infrastructure—a public cloud and compute facility—that Indian startups can access on preferential terms. It requires treating AI as a matter of strategic national importance, on par with nuclear technology or space exploration. It requires the political will to stand up to the most powerful corporations in history and say, "You can operate here, but you cannot own the future here." This path is unlikely.

Path B (The Road We Are On): This is the path of least resistance. The path of "free." The path of individual rationality leading to collective ruin. On this path, we accept the freebies, we integrate the tools, and we gracefully, skillfully, and profitably find our place in the new global supply chain of intelligence. We become the world's premier AI-appliers, fine-tuners, and human-in-the-loop providers. It is not a future of poverty. In fact, it could be a future of considerable prosperity for many. But it is a future of subservience. It is a future where our brightest minds work to make Google's product a little better for the Thai market, or to make Microsoft's AI a little more accurate for African dialects.

The question posed by this moment is not whether we will have new masters. We have always had them, in one form or another. The question is whether, in our hearts, we will still have the ambition to one day be the masters of our own digital destiny. Or have we permanently, and cheerfully, resigned ourselves to a future of serving theirs?

As I click "Accept" on my next free offer, I fear I already know the answer. And it makes the free AI feel very expensive indeed.