Introduction
A sizeable portion of the Indian and global tech ecosystem was gathered at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi last week. While I missed attending it due to personal reasons, as an open source maintainer and an alumnus of The Takshashila Institution's GCPP program, it has been heartwarming to see the summit statement officially mentioning open source - a far cry from the Parisian and the inaugural UK summits that found fairly limited utterances and support. However, I also believe that for these visions of "Sovereign AI" and global trade leadership to succeed, they must be built on a foundation of open, interoperable, and cryptographically verifiable standards.
Over the past year, I've been itching to put some of the skills from the GCPP program to use, but unfortunately, couldn't overcome the initial barrier of shitty first drafts. The opportunity again presented itself this year in the form of the draft Digital Trade Facilitation Bill, 2026, which was announced during the budget in February. Over the last weekend, I formally submitted a technical memorandum with my inputs to the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) regarding this draft.
Below is an executive summary of my recommendations.
Executive Summary
The Digital Trade Facilitation Bill, 2026, is a landmark step toward a paperless, digital-first trade ecosystem (BharatTradeNet). However, to ensure this infrastructure is resilient and inclusive for MSMEs, India must avoid proprietary vendor lock-in.
My submission, therefore, focused on three architectural pillars:
1. Keyless Trust via Transparency Logs: Existing digital signature frameworks often suffer from key management fatigue. I have advocated adopting transparency-log-based signing (modelled on Sigstore). By using short-lived certificates and immutable logs, we can reduce the risk of long-term credential compromise and lower the cost of entry for small exporters.
2. Metadata Integrity & Provenance: A digital Bill of Lading is only as trustworthy as its audit trail. To this end, I've recommended granting legal validity to Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) and automated provenance records. Utilising Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards ensures that every digital trade artefact has a machine-readable, tamper-proof chain of custody.
3. Ensuring Global Interoperability through Open Standards: To prevent digital islands, I've also recommended that India’s BharatTradeNet must consider utilising globally recognised open source protocols (compliant with UNCITRAL MLETR). This ensures that a digital document issued in Mumbai is natively verifiable by customs and banks in Singapore, Dubai, or Amsterdam without proprietary friction.
Conclusion
Technological sovereignty is not about building walls; it is about building interoperable standards that allow us to compete on a global stage. By anchoring our trade laws in Open Source principles, we ensure that India’s digital backbone is secure, scalable, and sovereign by design.
I have offered to provide a formal technical briefing to the DGFT Technical Committee on these architectures. If you are a founder, architect, or policy-maker navigating these changes, I'd love to hear your thoughts.