Data exploitation by big tech

Mr. Aggarwal drew a parallel between the British East India Company's exploitation of Indian resources and the current data practices of international tech companies. Though India currently produced 20 percent of the world's data, Mr. Aggarwal said, the benefits were mostly reaped by foreign entities. "Only one-tenth of the data is stored in India' 90 percent is exported to global data centres, largely owned by big techs," he noted. “It is processed into AI, brought back into India, and sold to us in dollars.” 

Mr. Aggarwal compared this to the British colonial context, drawing parallels with the exploitation of India's resources by the East India Company. “This was exactly what happened 200 years ago with the East India Company." The British used to export the raw material, cotton, to Britain and improt the finished product, cloth, into India and thus made huge profits. Now data was being exported and artificial intelligence was imported from abroad. This, in his view, was techno-colonialism.

Data ownership should stay with creators

Emphasising the need for India to develop its own technological solutions based on indigenous value systems, Mr. Aggarwal cited examples like digital public infrastructure. “When I see the future of AI, we have a uniquely Indian idea called digital public infrastructure," he said. “UPI is an example of that. ONDC is an example of that,” 

Mr. Aggarwal stressed that in the realm of AI, data ownership should stay with the creators. He also highlighted the importance of acknowledging the origin of content and data creators.

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