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Paper short abstract

This project examines structural conditions compelling India's deep-tech founders to pivot toward state defence priorities.It explores how capital and state procurement separate social justice from technological development,introducing a distinction between market compliance and political complicity

Paper long abstract

The drive for technological innovation in India is increasingly entangled with the ethical paradox of the green transition; the contradictory space where environmental solutions often reinforce the exclusionary systems they aim to disrupt. While many founders in India's deep-tech startup ecosystem (a sector defined by companies built upon major scientific or engineering breakthroughs rather than consumer apps) enter the space driven by personal ethical commitments to sustainability, they frequently undergo a strategic "pivot" toward state priorities in defense, aerospace, and surveillance.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among technologists and policymakers, this research traces this pivot. I argue that the involvement of founders in state projects is engineered through the architecture of capital and state policy. Under the umbrella of "Make in India," the state advances extractive green neoliberalism (Dunlap et al, 2024) —a framework blending market-oriented environmentalism with majoritarian ideology. To survive within this ecosystem, founders rely on specific financial instruments that demand rapid scalability, forcing a systematic distancing of their ethical commitments from their technological output.

Crucially, this research draws a conceptual distinction between compliance and complicity. Founders seek to comply with the aggressive fiduciary duties demanded by their investors and the strict procurement criteria of the state. However, this market compliance structurally guarantees political complicity. By successfully navigating the financial and regulatory rules of the startup ecosystem, founders' technologies are absorbed into the state's security apparatus, intertwining their everyday labor with authoritarian agendas in an era of democratic decline.