Building for a Digital India
Rick Sarkar
author
On India's 80th Independence Day, a look at how the country's digital economy transformed, what it changed for Indian businesses, and why we build websites, apps and link analytics here at home.
Today India marks its 80th Independence Day - seventy-nine completed years since that midnight in 1947.
This year's theme is Yuva Shakti for Viksit Bharat@2047: young India building toward the country's centenary. It is a fitting frame, because the generation now starting companies here did not inherit the India of scarcity that its parents navigated. It inherited something far stranger and far more promising - a country that skipped several stages of development entirely.
We are a small company. We build software from West Bengal - websites and applications for Indian businesses, and a link management platform of our own. That is a modest thing to set against the sweep of a national anniversary. But the reason any of it exists is tangled up in what has happened to this country over the last decade, so today seems like the right day to write about it honestly.
Seventy-Nine Years, and a Different Country
The India of 1947 was overwhelmingly rural, largely unlettered, and desperately short of infrastructure. Ambition then meant electricity, railways, steel, and food security. Those were the right ambitions for that India.
What is remarkable is not simply that the country solved many of those problems. It is that, having solved them late, India then moved faster than the countries that solved them early.
The reason is a pattern economists call leapfrogging: when you build infrastructure late, you build the current generation of it rather than inheriting an older one you must maintain. India never laid landlines to every village - it went to mobile. India never made the credit card ubiquitous - it went to UPI. Each time the country skipped a step, it also skipped the sunk costs and habits that keep richer economies tied to older systems.
That is why India today runs payment infrastructure that other countries study rather than pity.
The Leap India Actually Made
The numbers are worth stating plainly, because they are easy to be numb to when you live inside them.
India recorded more than 185 billion real-time digital payment transactions in FY 2024–25 - the highest volume of any country in the world. UPI alone now has over 550 million users and more than 65 million merchants, and handles well over 20 billion transactions in a single month. It accounts for roughly 85% of India's digital payments.
None of this existed in a meaningful way twelve years ago.
And payments were only the visible part. What actually got built was a stack of shared public infrastructure - Aadhaar for identity, UPI for payments, DigiLocker for documents, ONDC for commerce. Individually useful. Together, something closer to an operating system that any Indian business can build on without asking permission or paying rent to a gatekeeper.
The consequence for a small business is concrete. A shop in a district town can now accept a digital payment, verify a customer, store a document, and reach a buyer in another state - using infrastructure that cost it nothing to adopt.
What Changed for Indian Businesses
India has more than seven crore registered MSMEs. They are the actual economy - the kirana stores, the fabricators, the two-person agencies, the local manufacturers.
The Economic Survey 2024–25 estimates that 55–60% of registered MSMEs have moved online in some form. Industry surveys point the same direction: the large majority of small businesses now report confidence in using digital tools, and most say they are more confident than they were a year ago.
Read that carefully, though, because the interesting part is what it does not say.
Being online is not the same as being effective online. A business with a social page and a listing is online. Whether any of it is working is a completely different question - and it is a question most small Indian businesses currently cannot answer.
That gap is where the next decade of Indian software gets built.
The Question Has Moved On
For twenty years, the question facing an Indian business was: should we be online?
That question is settled. Customers are online, payments are online, discovery is online. Arguing about it is like arguing about whether to have a phone number.
The question now is: which part of being online is actually working?
A garment exporter in Ludhiana runs a message broadcast, a social campaign, and a printed catalogue at a trade fair. Orders come in. Which of the three produced them? A coaching institute in Kolkata advertises across four neighbourhoods. Which neighbourhood converts? A company in Bengaluru shares the same product link across email, social, and a partner newsletter. Which channel brought the customers who stayed?
Without measurement, every one of these businesses is guessing - and spending real money on the guess. The first wave of Indian digitisation got businesses online. The second wave is about making that presence legible, so money follows evidence instead of instinct.
Measurement is unglamorous work. It is also the difference between a marketing budget that compounds and one that leaks.
Getting Indian Businesses Online
Before a business can measure its presence, it needs one worth measuring. That is the other half of what we do.
SkyBrance builds websites and applications for Indian clients - company sites, web platforms, and mobile apps. It is ordinary work in one sense, and in another it is the most consequential thing a small business does in its first decade, because the site becomes the thing every campaign points at.
Building for this market has its own requirements, and they are not the ones you would design for elsewhere.
- Mobile is not a viewport, it is the whole audience. The overwhelming majority of Indian users will meet your business on a mid-range Android phone, often on mobile data with uneven coverage. A site that looks impressive on a designer's laptop and takes eight seconds to load on a 4G connection in a district town has failed at the only test that matters. Performance here is not polish; it is reach.
- Payments have to feel native. Indian customers expect to pay the way they already pay. A checkout that fights that expectation loses the sale at the last step.
- India is many markets, not one. Language, region, and buying behaviour vary enormously across the country. Software that treats India as a single homogeneous audience will underperform in most of it.
- It has to be maintainable by the business. A site the owner cannot update without calling a developer stops being updated. That is how businesses end up with a website advertising last year's prices.
Getting a business online is the foundation. What comes next is finding out whether the foundation is carrying any weight.
Why We Built This Here
That question - is any of this working? - is why we built SkyShare, our link management platform. It exists because we kept watching clients launch good websites and then have no idea which of their efforts brought anyone to them.
We built it in India, for the way Indian businesses actually operate. That is not a slogan - it shows up in specific product decisions.
- Because Indian commerce moves through shared links. In much of the world, marketing flows through email. Here it flows through messages - a link forwarded to a group, a link in a broadcast, a link pasted into a bio. The link is the channel. A tool that treats links as an afterthought is a tool built for a different country.
- Because a link is a trust decision here. Digital fraud has made Indian users appropriately cautious about unfamiliar links, and rightly so. A branded short link on your own domain answers the question "who sent this?" before anyone taps. That matters more in a market where the default posture toward an unknown link is suspicion.
- Because our links live on Indian ground. Our own short domain, skyh.in, sits on the country's namespace. That is a small thing, and also not nothing - a .in link reads as local to the person receiving it.
- Because the support is in your timezone. When something breaks for an Indian business at 11 a.m. IST, it should not have to wait for a support team in another hemisphere to wake up.
We are a young company - SkyBrance launched this year - and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But we are building for a market we live in, and that turns out to matter in the details.
Where Indian Businesses Lose the Thread
In practice, a few specific gaps show up again and again with businesses here.
- Everything is "Direct." A campaign runs across messaging, social, and print, and the analytics dashboard attributes almost all of it to Direct traffic. The channels were never tagged, so the report cannot tell them apart. Fixing this costs nothing - it is what UTM parameters exist for.
- Printed campaigns are permanently frozen. A brochure goes to print with a link pointing at a specific page. That page changes. Ten thousand brochures now point somewhere wrong, and nothing can be done. An editable destination makes this a two-minute fix instead of a reprint - the reasoning is covered in our guide on 301 vs 302 redirects.
- Regional performance is invisible. India is not one market. A campaign can work in Pune and fail in Guwahati for reasons worth understanding - but only if the data separates them. City-level click analytics turn a national average into an actual picture.
- Bots inflate the numbers. Crawlers and scanners click links. Counting them as customers produces a report that flatters you and misleads you. Filtering them out is not a nice-to-have; it is the difference between a number and a fiction.
- Nobody can find last quarter's links. Links get created ad hoc by whoever needs one, saved nowhere, and lost. When the campaign is reviewed, half the data is unrecoverable. Managing links in one place sounds trivial until you have tried to reconstruct a quarter without it.
None of these are hard problems. They are just problems nobody gets around to until the cost of not solving them becomes visible.
What We're Building Toward
Viksit Bharat@2047 is a twenty-one year horizon. Whatever a developed India looks like by then, it will not be built primarily by large companies. It will be built by millions of small ones that grew steadily because they made better decisions with better information.
We are not going to overstate our part in that. We build websites and applications for Indian businesses, and we make link infrastructure - branded short links, click analytics, and the reporting that turns campaign activity into something you can act on. It is one small component of a much larger machine.
But small components are what infrastructure is made of. UPI is, at bottom, a way to move a number from one place to another. Its significance came from being reliable, cheap, and available to everyone.
That is the standard worth building toward. Tools that are honest about what they measure, affordable enough that a two-person business can use them, and good enough that nobody has to look abroad for an alternative.
Seventy-nine years ago this country won the right to decide its own direction. The work since has been about building the capacity to act on it. In software, that means Indian businesses should be able to run on Indian tools, built by people who understand the market, without compromise.
We are one small company working on one small piece of that. Happy 80th Independence Day.
Ready to build your presence - and find out what's actually working?
Frequently Asked Questions
How has India's digital economy changed for small businesses?
India recorded over 185 billion real-time digital payment transactions in FY 2024–25, the highest of any country, and shared public infrastructure like UPI, Aadhaar, DigiLocker and ONDC now lets even very small businesses accept payments, verify customers and reach buyers across states. The Economic Survey 2024–25 estimates that 55–60% of registered MSMEs have moved online in some form.
What should an Indian business look for in a website or app?
Performance on mid-range Android phones over mobile data, because that is how most of the country will actually reach you. Beyond that: payment flows that match how Indian customers already pay, an approach that accounts for regional and language differences rather than treating India as one market, and a site the business can update itself without calling a developer every time.
Why do Indian businesses need link analytics?
Because most Indian marketing moves through shared links - forwarded in messages, placed in bios, printed on material - and without tracking, all of it collapses into a single "Direct" bucket in analytics. Link analytics separate the channels, so a business can see which of its campaigns actually produced orders instead of guessing.
What does a branded short link do for trust in India?
A branded short link runs on your own domain, so the recipient can see who sent it before they tap. In a market where users have learned to be cautious about unfamiliar links, that visible ownership meaningfully affects whether people click at all.
Is SkyShare built in India?
Yes. SkyBrance is an Indian company building from West Bengal, and SkyShare is developed here for the way Indian businesses actually work - link-first sharing, regional click analytics, short links on India's own .in namespace, and support that operates in Indian business hours.