Ola founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Bhavish Aggarwal coined the term "techno-colonialism" to characterise the practice of exporting Indian data to international data centres, processing it there, and then selling it back to India for different uses.
Aggarwal linked this to the British East India Company's exploitation of Indian resources in an interview with an ANI. He observed that although India produces a substantial amount of the world's data, foreign tech companies mainly profit from it.
"Only one-tenth of that data is stored in India. 90 per cent is exported to global data centres, largely owned by big tech companies. It is processed into AI, brought back into India, and sold to us in dollars. Yes, it is exactly what happened 200 years ago with the East India Company. They used to export cotton and bring clothes from abroad. Now we're exporting data and bringing intelligence from abroad… Techno-colonialism," Aggarwal explained.
"We as an Indian ecosystem need to realize that these battles are not legal battles. These are technology battles. And we have to build our own technology based on our value systems. For example, when I see the future of AI, we have a uniquely Indian idea called digital public infrastructure. UPI is an example of that. ONDC is an example of that," he further said.
Aggarwal believes that data is important and should be owned by the data creators themselves. "We put data on our social media. It's our IPR. It should belong to the creator. And we have to encourage and nudge people to share data in a privacy-preserving way openly. India has the largest data, so we can bring a lot of data into the public domain... That can be used to create the largest intelligence possible," he added.
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