It is ironic that India wants to lead the world in AI, software, and deep tech and recently trying to showcase itself as super tech giant. But first, it needs to stop taxing its way out of that future.
A Samsung SSD made in South Korea costs ₹37,000 at home. In the United States it costs ₹46,000. In India, the country that keeps announcing itself as the next tech superpower, the same drive costs ₹1,13,660 at MRP, and ₹73,999 on a good day. We traced every rupee of that gap. What we found is not an anomaly. Not geography. Not manufacturing costs. Not product quality. Not transportation. Not a shortage of technology. It is the WRONG policy.
I was talking to a friend when he mentioned something that stopped me cold. A Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD one of the best consumer storage drives in the world, costs roughly four times more in India than in the United States. Same product. Same brand. Same silicon wafers, manufactured in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. I was aghast by that.
That conversation sent me down a research rabbit hole covering customs law, tax code, supply chains, and global pricing strategy. What I found is not just a pricing anomaly. It is a structural indictment of how India taxes its own technological future.
The Indian government is busy organising AI summits and announcing semiconductor missions. That is all well and good on paper. But while those press conferences happen, a middle-class engineering student in Lucknow cannot afford the storage drive that his counterpart in Seoul or San Jose takes for granted. And we call this the road to becoming a tech superpower.
The Numbers
This is the Samsung 990 Pro 4TB NVMe SSD, the same product, same model number, same factory, priced across markets as of June 2026:
- 🇰🇷 South Korea (pre-2026 normal price): ₩600,000 : approximately ₹37,000
- 🇺🇸 United States (Amazon, June 2026): ~$550 : approximately ₹46,200
- 🇰🇷 South Korea (current, NAND shortage spike): ₩900,000+ : approximately ₹55,500
- 🇮🇳 India (street / deal price) : ₹73,999 : (Source : MD Computers, Computech Store)
- 🇮🇳 India (MRP / full retail): ₹1,13,660 (listed MRP, June 2026)
The product was manufactured in South Korea. An Indian consumer pays between 2× and 3× what a South Korean pays for a product made in South Korea. The entire gap is created by policy, not distance, not demand, not product quality. Policy.
“Every extra tax on SSDs, GPUs, CPUs, laptops, and servers is effectively a tax on innovation, learning, and productivity. You cannot build a technological superpower by making technology a luxury.”
The Journey: From Pyeongtaek to Your Desk
We traced the exact path a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB takes from its birthplace to an Indian buyer. At each stop, cost is added. Not value, cost.
Stage 1 – Samsung Fab, Pyeongtaek, South Korea
The 990 Pro uses Samsung’s 8th-generation V-NAND technology. The controller, NAND chips, and PCB are all made in-house across Samsung’s three fab campuses i.e. Giheung, Hwaseong, and Pyeongtaek.
Samsung is one of the only companies in the world that does the entire stack itself. The product leaves Korea at a transfer price that, converted to INR, is somewhere around ₹30,000–37,000 depending on the exchange rate.
Stage 2 – Indian Customs, Port of Entry
Here is where it starts. The shipment is assessed at its CIF value (Cost + Insurance + Freight). Two taxes hit immediately:
- Basic Customs Duty (BCD): ~10% on the CIF value. HSN code for SSDs is 85235100 under the Customs Tariff Act, 1975.
- Social Welfare Surcharge (SWS): 10% on the BCD itself. So you pay a tax on a tax before the product even clears the port.
Stage 3 — IGST at the Border
This is the mechanism almost nobody talks about. Under the IGST Act, 2017, IGST is not charged on the product’s actual value. It is charged on (CIF value + BCD + SWS). The 18% IGST is applied to a base that has already been inflated by customs duties. You are paying 18% on a number that is already 11% larger than the actual product price. Tax on a tax on a tax. How messed up is that?
Stage 4 — National Distributor
Cleared stock goes to national distributors, Rashi Peripherals, Redington, or Ingram Micro. They add 4–7% margin plus logistics overhead.
Stage 5 — Regional Dealer
City or state-level sub-distributors take another 3–5% cut.
Stage 6 — Retailer (Amazon / Flipkart / Nehru Place)
The retailer adds 5–10%. And then charges you GST at 18% on the final MRP, which by now already embeds all the upstream costs.
Result: Four tax layers. Three margin layers. A product that cost ₹37,000 in Korea now costs ₹73,999 to ₹1,13,660 in India.
The Paradox: Why Is It Cheaper in the US Than in South Korea?
This is the question that breaks the narrative of “imports are just expensive.” The product is made in South Korea. So why does an American pay less than a South Korean?
The US has a free trade agreement with South Korea.
The KORUS FTA, signed in 2012, eliminates meaningful customs duties on electronics between the two countries. So the product lands in the US at close to Samsung’s actual transfer price, and then Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and Micro Center compete aggressively to sell it. Retail competition does the rest. India has no equivalent FTA with South Korea. The full duty stack applies.
South Korea itself spiked in 2026 for a different reason.
A global NAND supply crunch pushed Samsung to prioritise enterprise and data centre customers over domestic consumers. The 990 Pro 1TB hit â‚©470,000 (~₹29,000) in Korea in April 2026, nearly double its previous price. The home market does not get a “made here” discount. Samsung prices by market structure, not geography of manufacture.
India loses on every single factor simultaneously:
no FTA, no retail competition, a multi-layered distributor chain, and a market Samsung does not need to fight aggressively for. The result is a captive market paying maximum price.
Who Actually Pays
The obvious answer: Indian consumers. The deeper answer: the next generation of India’s technical talent.
- The student in a tier-2 city who wants to learn machine learning but cannot run meaningful models on a phone or a borrowed school computer. A proper workstation SSD alone can cost a month of a family’s income.
- The indie game developer who wants to build for a global market but cannot afford the development hardware that competitors in Poland or Brazil take for granted.
- The AI researcher at a state university who has genuine curiosity and ability but no institutional grant and no path to compute that makes experimentation possible. They end up at an IT services firm instead of a lab.
- The hardware enthusiast who would, given access, tinker their way into building deep technical knowledge that eventually produces founders, CTOs, and chip architects. That tinkering culture barely exists in India because the tools cost too much.
- The small business owner who wants to run a local server instead of paying indefinitely for cloud compute, but finds the upfront hardware cost prohibitive, so they export that money to AWS permanently.
Every one of these people is being quietly taxed for their ambition. Many of them give up not because they lack talent or drive, but because the economics of entry are too harsh. Many others leave the country entirely. We call this brain drain and wonder why it keeps happening.
The Legal Architecture of the Problem
This is not happening by accident. There is a specific set of laws creating this outcome:
- Customs Act, 1962 — Foundation law enabling BCD collection at port of entry on all imports.
- Customs Tariff Act, 1975 — HSN code 85235100 classifies SSDs. Duty rates set annually via Finance Act (Budget).
- IGST Act, 2017 — 18% IGST charged on (CIF + BCD + SWS) at border. The cascading mechanism that taxes an already-taxed value.
- CGST / SGST Acts, 2017 — 18% GST on final retail sale (9% CGST + 9% SGST), applied on the already-inflated MRP.
- Finance Acts, 2018–present — The Phased Manufacturing Programme progressively raised import duties on finished electronics to incentivise domestic assembly — a policy whose stated goal was to build a domestic industry that, for SSDs, still does not meaningfully exist.
- Foreign Trade (Development & Regulation) Act, 1992 — DGFT controls import channels. India has no FTA with South Korea equivalent to the KORUS deal that gives American importers a duty-free path.
What China, Taiwan, and South Korea Did Instead
The countries that now lead in semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and hardware manufacturing share a common policy thread: they treated technology access as industrial infrastructure, not as a revenue source or a luxury to be taxed.
South Korea built Samsung and SK Hynix with government-backed subsidies and deliberately cheap domestic component access in the early decades. China’s Shenzhen maker culture thrived on cheap electronic components, the state treated electronics as industrial inputs. Taiwan’s TSMC ecosystem emerged because hardware was cheap enough for engineers to experiment at every level.
None of these countries taxed technology hardware as a luxury. All of them made it cheap enough that the next generation of engineers could afford to learn on it, break it, rebuild it, and eventually export the results of that learning to the world.
India has a world-class IT services industry. But there is a persistent and fair critique that this talent was built on software skills, coding, system integration, business applications, rather than on deep hardware intuition and systems-level thinking. The countries that lead in semiconductors got there because their engineers grew up understanding hardware. That culture requires cheap hardware.
Technology Is Infrastructure, Not Luxury
We have a well-understood principle for roads, electricity, water, and broadband: access is not a luxury to be taxed heavily, it is infrastructure to be enabled, sometimes subsidised, and certainly not made artificially expensive through policy.
High-performance computing hardware deserves the same classification. A developer’s workstation is the machine on which value is created. An SSD is the difference between a workflow that is productive and one that is maddening. A GPU is, right now in 2026, the fundamental unit of AI research and development.
When you tax these things as luxuries, you are taxing learning, taxing productivity, taxing innovation. The people who bear that tax most heavily are not the established tech companies with procurement budgets and import exemptions, they are the individuals, the students, the early-stage founders who represent India’s actual potential.
What a smarter policy would look like:
- Graduated duty structures that distinguish between consumer electronics and professional or research-grade hardware, the way industrial machinery is taxed differently from luxury imports.
- Education and research exemptions that allow universities, registered startups, and individual researchers to import compute hardware at reduced or zero duty.
- An FTA with South Korea on electronics or at minimum a targeted tariff reduction on computing hardware categories where no domestic alternative exists.
- GST rate review on computers and peripherals. 18% on a category that is now fundamental to economic participation is not defensible.
- Public computing infrastructure : affordable access to high-performance compute through government facilities, the way public libraries democratised access to books.
None of this requires dismantling fiscal policy. It requires recognising that the long-term return on cheap technology access for skilled workers, research output, startup creation, export earnings which would vastly exceed the short-term revenue from taxing that access.
The Opportunity Cost of Getting This Wrong
India is at an inflection point. The global AI build-out is happening right now. The decisions countries make in the next five to ten years about compute access, talent development, and research infrastructure will determine who leads the next wave of technological civilisation and who merely participates in it at the margins.
If India prices its own citizens out of the hardware needed to learn, experiment, and build if the next generation of AI researchers gives up because they cannot afford to run experiments, if the hardware hacker culture never develops because the tools cost a semester’s tuition, if engineers keep emigrating because they can build more freely elsewhere then no amount of policy speeches about becoming a tech superpower will change the outcome.
The ambition is right. The rhetoric is right. The policy, on this specific question, is wrong.
Treat technology as national infrastructure. Make it cheap. Make it accessible. Trust that the people who get access to it will build things that justify the investment many times over.
Because they will. They always do. They just need the tools first.
Data sources: MD Computers India, Computech Store, Amazon.in, Amazon.com, WccFTech (Korea pricing), ClearTax (HSN/GST data), Samsung Semiconductor official site, Shreesales distributor network guide. Prices as of June 2026. USD at ₹84. KRW at ₹0.062.