Taking national data seriously

India must not trade away its national data rights at the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations
In a digital economy, data is the central resource. The Prime Minister recently compared data to property at the advent of the industrial era. Data is being considered as a nation’s new wealth. How data will be employed fruitfully, and its value captured, will decide a nation’s rank in the emerging new global geo-economic and geo-political hierarchies. The global digital or artificial intelligence (AI) economy is currently a two-horse race between the U.S. and China. It is feared that all other countries, including the European Union (EU) and major developing countries such as India, will have to become fully digitally dependent on one of these two digital superpowers. This will considerably compromise their economic and political independence, something referred to as digital colonisation. The shift to digital power, and its concentration, is very evident. Seven of the top eight companies by market cap globally today are data-based corporations. A decade back, this list was dominated by industrial and oil giants. Almost all top digital corporations in the world are U.S. or Chinese. social purposes. Appropriate data policies must ensure that the required data is actually available to Indian digital businesses. After all, most of this data in the first place is collected from Indian communities, artefacts and natural phenomenon, and is about them. Global corporations like to consider data as a freely shareable open resource till the data is out there, with the people, communities, outside ‘things’, etc. But the moment they collect the data, it seems to become their de facto private property and they refuse to share it, even for important public interest purposes.
This lawless logjam can only be broken by asserting a community’s legal right over data that is derived from, and is about, the community concerned, or about ‘things’ that belong to it. This is the concept of community data inscribed in India’s draft e-commerce policy. A great amount of data would indeed be fully private to the corporation concerned. Public agencies and regulators may not be too bothered about how such private data is used, where it is moved to, etc. But a big part of data that comes into play in a digital economy is community data, which has to be treated carefully. In less important areas or sectors it may need no or very little regulation, but in other important areas, the community data concerned may require close regulation. This could be about accessing such data for social purposes, ensuring that important public interest is met in various uses of data, and to make data available to domestic businesses, to stimulate competition and for India’s digital industrialisation.
All this requires India to preserve its data policy space. We have not even begun dealing with the very complex data policy issues, including data classification, data ownership rights, data sharing, data trusts, and so on. This is a task that India should urgently embark upon, in full earnest. There is no time to lose as global advantages and vulnerabilities in terms of a digital economy are fast being entrenched. This is very similar to how the Industrial Revolution triggered fundamental changes and new global power configurations in the 19th century. In signing on a free flow of data regime, however cleverly worded, India will largely end up ceding most of its data policy space, and data sovereignty. And with it, it will give up any chances for effectively using Indian data for India’s development, and for digital industrialisation to become a top digital power. It will effectively be laying the path for permanent digital dependency, with India’s data flowing freely to data intelligence centres in the U.S., and now some in China. From these global centres, a few global “intelligence corporations” will digitally, and intelligent-ally, control and run the entire world. With countries yet hardly clear about appropriate data policies, and the data-related requirements for digital industrialisation, it is not clear what the hurry is to sign global free flow of data agreements. The digital economy seems to be growing and flourishing very well even without such regimes. Disengaging from signing binding agreements on uninhibited data flows across borders does not mean that a country would simply localise all data. Some kinds of data may indeed need to be localised, while others should freely flow globally. It just means that a country retains complete data policy space, and the means to shape its digital industrialisation, and thus its digital future. Our understanding in these areas is just now beginning to take shape. It will be extremely unwise to foreclose our options even before we discover and decide the right data and digital polices and path for India.

Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/taking-national-data-seriously/article29721198.ece

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