In the eighteenth episode, I speak to Pradip Ninan Thomas, Associate Professor, University of Queensland, about his recent book The Politics of Digital India: Between Local Compulsions and Transnational Pressures published by Oxford University Press in 2019. The book situates and locates Digital India in a global and local context by identifying the pressures, local and transnational, affecting India’s digital trajectory. The conversation begins by tracing Pradip’s journey with this book covering his previous works on media and telecommunications in India. Next, we historicise India’s current digital moment by covering the ’technological' continuities from the British Raj to the newly independent Indian government. The conversation then moves to understand what Thomas means by ‘digital’, how it manifests in India and how the 'digital' is negotiated, shaped and contested by political and geopolitical considerations including the Indian state and the United States. The conversation ends by wading into the importance of data to India’s digital economy, the potential and implications of the Indian state’s digital infrastructure projects and how digital governance aids surveillance.