| Sumario: | Part of a special section on information policy, power, and the state. The writer explores the roles that the Indian state has assumed in promoting the software industry and the different forms of power—instrumental, structural, symbolic, or transformational—that have been used by the Indian state to this end. Although India's information technology and software policies prior to 1984 were consistent with a model of state-led planned development, a guided and guarded economic liberalization took place in the mid 1980s that emphasized both greater access to imports and the promotion of software exports while still closely regulating the domestic computer and software industries. However, it became clearer in the early 1990s, when economic policies for other sectors were liberalized, that the software policy contained elements that could not be completely accounted for under the idealized economic account of liberalization.
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