advertisement
Editor: Purnendu Pritam | Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya
Digital India was among the long list of topics that Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about at the ‘Howdy, Modi’ event on Sunday, 22 September.
In an elaborate speech, that lasted over 45 minutes, the prime minister spent about three minutes on the topic of ‘Digital India’ and spoke about it in terms of India as a data economy.
PM Modi said two specific things about data:
Modi’s description of data as “gold” is interesting because data had been compared to a variety of commodities. Facebook’s global head of communications, Nick Clegg, during a recent visit to India in September, had described data as “water”.
So, what really is data?
To some, there might be an inherent contradiction in describing data as “gold” and qualifying it as a highly valuable commodity and also calling it “cheap”. How does one connect the two?
Perhaps a more apt metaphor for data is, us. For the value of data is derived from the information it contains about us, the consumers of ‘cheap’ data.
The value of data arises from the fact that mining it gives companies, businesses and governments granular insight into individuals and behavioral patterns.
Behind the scenes, once the hype and dust of ‘Howdy, Modi’ dies down, the two leaders are expected to engage in negotiations on the data of Indian citizens – specifically on India’s proposed policies on data localisation.
Basically, the government has been saying that any data generated in India should be stored in servers within India.
Given that the internet itself is still a very young invention, nations across the globe are still trying to figure out how best to manage, regulate and govern it.
So far, India has four regulations that mandate storing data on servers within its borders:
The argument is that data stored in servers within the country can be mined, merged and monetised as a national resource to boost the digital economy, something hinted at in the government’s Economic Survey.
Clegg had met with PM Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, NSA Ajit Doval and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in September to discuss data localisation and other issues, and is reported to have said that, “Data is a much more fluid, intangible thing and it crosses borders.”
India is among the few democracies in the world without a data protection law and the direction such a law takes when it is eventually tabled in Parliament could very well be decided during the ongoing Modi-Trump talks.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)