Sovereignty 2035: The India Equation is a landmark blueprint for a nation standing at its most consequential crossroads since independence. In a century where power no longer flows from GDP, military might, or population size alone, Sandeep Chavan argues that modern sovereignty is determined by three interlocking variables-Capability - Stability - Integration-and that India must urgently rebuild its architecture if it is to survive, adapt, and rise in the compute era.
Through cutting-edge analysis, sharp narrative, and an educator's clarity, Chavan unpacks the deeper forces reshaping global power: semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, supply chains, talent ecosystems, institutional capacity, and digital rails. He demonstrates how the United States, China, and Russia represent three competing operating systems of modern power-and why India must walk a tightrope between integration and dependence, competition and cooperation, ambition and preparation.
The book exposes India's internal contradictions with honesty and empathy:
- a billion dreams sprinting on outdated systems,
- world-class minds leaking out of fragile pipelines,
- institutions exhausted by political interference,
- capability gaps hidden beneath national narratives,
- and a nation paying a heavy strategic tax for its own internal chaos.
Yet Sovereignty 2035 is not a story of despair-it is a design for acceleration. Chavan outlines the architecture India must build: strong courts, empowered regulators, autonomous research ecosystems, leadership teams instead of icons, semiconductor and compute sovereignty, manufacturing discipline, talent networks, stable institutions, and a modern national security framework that integrates digital, intelligence, and physical domains.
He offers scenario pathways for 2025-2035, revealing futures of acceleration, stagnation, vulnerability, and collapse-with India's global position determined not by emotion or ideology, but by architecture and execution. Each pathway is a mirror held to policymakers and citizens alike, showing how choices made today ripple into destiny tomorrow.
Bold, urgent, prophetic, and unapologetically clear, this book reframes the debate on India's strategic future. It challenges leaders, thinkers, educators, and citizens to look beyond narratives and confront the variables that truly determine national power. It insists that slogans and sentiment are insufficient; only architecture, coherence, and execution can secure sovereignty in the compute century.
If India strengthens capability, stability, and integration together, 2035 becomes a launch window-a moment when the nation ascends as a sovereign power in the new global order. If even one variable fails, 2035 becomes the deadline for a future lost-a point of no return where ambition collapses into dependency.
This is the equation India must solve-before the world moves on.
