Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal says foreign cos 'siphoning off' India's data like East India Company

Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal coined the term "techno-colonialism" to describe a situation where India's data is exported to global data centers, processed, and then repurposed and sold back to India.

In an interview to a news agency, Aggarwal compared this to the exploitation of Indian resources by the British East India Company. He pointed out that while India generates a significant portion of the world's data, the benefits are largely captured by foreign tech giants. "Only one-tenth of that data is stored in India. Ninety percent is exported to global data centers, 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," Aggarwal explained.

"They used to export cotton and bring back clothes. Now we're exporting data and bringing back intelligence. It's techno-colonialism," he added.

"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 said.

India, he asserted, produces 20 percent of the world's digital data, reflecting its equivalent global population. "We produce 20 percent of the world's data. Our strength in the world of AI is significant. We are the largest population, and data is what creates intelligence in AI. We should produce even more data because we are young, and our per capita data production is higher," he stated, referring to the advancement of internet services in the country.

Aggarwal believes that in the AI era, data is core 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 shared.

He also emphasized the importance of attributing original content or data creators. "We in India can create this paradigm, but we can only do it if all of society comes together. Companies like Krutrim need to exist for that. We need to evangelize this philosophy with stakeholders like the media, bureaucrats, etc. India will have to invest as a business ecosystem with government incentives for a decade or two because we are very behind," he added.

Krutrim, a brainchild of Bhavish Aggarwal, generates text with an innate sense of Indian cultural sensibilities and relevance. It supports all 22 Indian scheduled languages and Indian contexts. The Krutrim model can fluently switch between languages and discuss nuanced topics ranging from poetry in an Indian language to Bollywood movies and creative masala dosa recipes. It has been available in beta version for consumers since February 2024.