vinit goenka

DEFENCE CAPITAL Business and Politics of Arming India February 2020

“Data is the new oil, Data is energy, Data is power and whosoever controls data, controls the minds and controls the world.” For centuries the world has faced colonization, be it military, energy, and now a new phenomenon called ‘data colonisation’. Hence, ‘Data Sovereignty’ is the only tool to fight Data Colonization. Storage of Data has been a major challenge and cloud has given rise to concept of cross-border storage of data. But, is this concept been used to colonise Indians? What stops India from storing its own data and computing its own data? Why
can’t critical data remain within the geographical and legal boundaries of India?
A report suggests that India has crossed 800 million mobile phone users in 2019. It is expected that one million gigabytes of data a day will be carried by internet networks in India by 2021-22. The data ranges from entertainment, social media, health records, financial services, education, e-governance, research, science and technology, to defence.
Over the last decade, we have seen Russia, Germany, France, Indonesia, Vietnam mandate through their strict data sovereignty laws that their citizen’s data be stored on physical
servers within the country’s physical borders. Europe has implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which also restricts organisations from transferring personal data that originated in Europe to any country with inadequate data protection laws.
Australia has clearly defined legal framework with its updated Australia Privacy Act on how the data should be stored and controlled. United States federal agencies and defence organisations require their data be stored exclusively within the United States for national security.

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