Knowledge Sovereignty for Comprehensive National Power

When I built a seven-pillar Comprehensive National Power Index earlier this year (Singh, 2026a), the technology pillar produced one of the widest India–China gaps in the dataset: 18.8 against 57.8 on a 100-point scale, a chasm driven by R&D intensity, patent filings, and AI capacity. The number I could not put into the index — because no public dataset measures it cleanly — was the one I knew mattered most: who decides what counts as knowledge in the first place. Sonali Gupta's recent commentary in Economic & Political Weekly (Gupta, 2026) is, in effect, a description of that missing variable. Her finding that Indian institutions hold 32 out of 2,659 places on the ABDC Journal Quality List, none of them at A or A*, is not only an academic statistic. It is a measurement, in a different register, of the same deficit my index struggled to capture.

A working definition is useful before going further. By knowledge sovereignty I mean the capacity of a polity to set, govern, and be recognised for the standards by which its own knowledge is validated and made authoritative — for itself and in the wider world. It is not the same as research output, which India produces plenty of. It is the question of whose institutions adjudicate that output.

Comprehensive National Power, as articulated by Hu and Men (2002) of Tsinghua University and operationalised across the literature since, is the aggregate of resources a state commands to ensure its survival and development. Knowledge and technology resources sit alongside GDP and military strength as load-bearing pillars, not ornamental extras. In my own index (Singh, 2026a), I argued that India's largest convertible asset is its human capital and soft power; the largest unaddressed liability is the technology and governance gap. Gupta's piece points at a third category that sits awkwardly between the two: the institutional architecture through which Indian human capital becomes globally legible. Right now, that architecture is largely rented.

The argument is not against international publication or peer review. Indian scholars in foreign journals is a good thing; the global peer-review commons is one of the more genuinely cooperative institutions modernity has built, and Indian scholars are contributors to it, not only consumers. The argument is narrower. A country whose CNP profile shows the kind of latent human-capital and soft-power assets India's does should be a co-producer of the validation infrastructure for its own scholarship, not only a customer of someone else's.

The cost we pay

The direct outflow is now measurable. Indian researchers pay article-processing charges of up to ₹10 lakh to publish in foreign journals, while Indian institutions pay cash bonuses of ₹50,000 to ₹5 lakh per ABDC-listed publication (Gupta, 2026). The Government of India then commits roughly ₹6,000 crore through the One Nation One Subscription scheme to buy back access to that same literature (Gupta, 2026). The five largest publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, SAGE, and Taylor & Francis — together earn over $7 billion annually with margins approaching 40 percent, comparable to the largest technology firms (Gupta, 2026).

An analogy I lived inside

The closest parallel I can draw is one I watched up close during my time as Technology Analyst at the UN's India Technology Hub, working across UNOICT and multiple UN agencies in India and beyond. The same shape of dependency was visible in public software procurement. Governments and multilateral bodies were paying enormous licensing fees for the basic infrastructure of their work — operating systems, productivity software, cloud services. Public money went in; vendor rents came out. The outcry produced, among other responses, the UN Open Source Principles, first endorsed in March 2025 and now backed by more than sixty organisations, which commit UN agencies to "open by default," a preference for open-source solutions, and contribution back to the commons (United Nations, 2025). The Harvard Business School working paper by Hoffmann et al. (2024) estimated the demand-side value of widely used open-source software at $8.8 trillion — a figure that exists precisely because the dependency was named and addressed.

The Indian academic circuit has the same shape. The University Grants Commission pays Junior and Senior Research Fellowship stipends of ₹37,000 to ₹42,000 a month to fund doctoral research (UGC, n.d.). That research, subsidised by public money, is submitted to foreign journals. The IIMs and other premier institutions then pay cash incentives — again from public funds — when the work is accepted (Gupta, 2026). Students and institutions pay once more, through fees and the ONOS subscription, to read it. Money flows out at every stage; credibility flows in, rented rather than built. The analogy is not perfect — academic publishing rides on a genuinely collaborative ecosystem of unpaid reviewers and editors in a way software licensing does not, and that distinction matters. But the financial architecture, and the policy lesson, rhymes closely enough. What the UN began addressing through its open-source principles, India has not yet seriously named.

The indirect cost we bear

The harder cost is not easily quantified, and it is the one my CNP index could not capture. Questions about Indian federalism, caste, monsoon agriculture, informal labour, and rural credit are often framed to be legible to editors and reviewers whose contextual familiarity with the questions is limited. Methods are selected for publish-ability abroad rather than for analytical fit at home. Domestic policy debates come to inherit not only findings but the prior assumptions embedded in how those findings were framed. The agenda-setting power that should accompany a country of India's scale is steadily displaced, one peer-review cycle at a time.

This is the same conversion problem I flagged in the CNP work (Singh, 2026b): India holds the structural assets — a 34 percent youth share, a $129 billion remittance flow, a globally resonant diaspora — but converts them into reputational and agenda-setting influence at a discount. Knowledge sovereignty is one of the conversion losses.

So what?

Atmanirbharta has been declared doctrine in defence, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and digital public infrastructure. The same logic applies, perhaps more urgently, to the institutions that produce the analytical frames through which a society understands itself. A nation that builds its own missiles but rents its credibility is incomplete in a way no GDP figure will capture. I do not have a four-point fix to offer here, and I am wary of writing one from this distance. The institutions that would have to act — the older IIMs, the IITs, the ICSSR, the UGC — sit closer to this problem than I do, and the question of what a domestically governed validation infrastructure should look like for India is genuinely open. The point of this piece is the prior one: that the question deserves to sit on the same table as the defence, semiconductor, and DPI conversations, because it belongs there.

About Author

Rahul Singh is a development sector practitioner with a decade of experience spanning the UN system (UNDP, UNICEF, UNOICT), state governments, and social impact consulting. His work centres on programme design, impact measurement, and data-driven policy advocacy — with demonstrated expertise in SDG alignment, social protection, disaster risk resilience, and women-led development across national and sub-national scales. At Chakra Dialogues Foundation, he leads Impact & Programmes, anchoring the foundation's policy analysis, impact frameworks, and programme strategy to strengthen India's Comprehensive National Power. He is an alumnus of IRMA (Anand), and writes on public policy, governance, and development economics.

References

Gupta, S. (2026, April 25). Making itself irrelevant: How Indian academia is outsourcing its credibility to foreign journals. Economic & Political Weekly, 61(17), 19–22.

Hoffmann, M., Nagle, F., & Zhou, Y. (2024). The value of open source software (Working Paper No. 24-038). Harvard Business School.

Hu, A., & Men, H. (2002). The rising of modern China: Comprehensive national power and grand strategy (1980–2000). Strategy and Management, 3(2).

Singh, R. (2026a). Measuring the power gap: A Comprehensive National Power Index assessment of India and China (2024–25). SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/fhgzj_v1

Singh, R. (2026b, March). From SDGs to CNP: Why India needs a new strategic compass. LinkedIn Pulse.

United Nations. (2025, March 25). Sixteen organizations endorse the UN Open Source Principles. Office of Information and Communications Technology.

University Grants Commission. (n.d.). Junior Research Fellowship in Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences. Government of India.