India needs strong policy on whole stack of data management: Bhavish Aggarwal

India needs to bring strong policy and implementation of policy on data sovereignity, data residency, data management as well as data decision making, Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal said during a session in the Business Today’s India@100 summit. 

“ I really believe one of India's core strengths in the future is our population scale. 20% of the world lives in India. We're also more younger...This data scale is our strength, and we need to bring strong policy and implementation of policy on data sovereignty, data residency, data management in the country, data decision making in the country. It's not just about the data sovereignty layer, the whole stack of data management needs to be through policy and through implementation brought into India, and that's what will really give us control for our AI future,” said Aggarwal.

Aggarwal’s statement comes at a time when the government is likely introduce the rules of data protection act within a month. 

According to Aggarwal, looking at the current trajectory of AI development, it seems like major tech companies are taking on roles akin to gods or lawmakers, determining what is right and wrong. “In my view, that right is only with the law of the land, and the law of the land should be supreme, and the law of the land should be happening to whichever AI model, whichever social media company, whichever, whatever digital platform is running in that country, and even more so for a complex country like India, where some of these nuances are very important to protect according to the law,” said Aggarwal. 

Aggarwal launched the generative AI company Krutrim in December last year aiming to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. “With Krutrim, the opportunity and ambition is to build India’s AI tech stack. And for too long in India, we have used global technologies without realising the implications of it,” said Aggarwal.

The founder of Ola observes that in the last 20-25 years, the global tech industry has boomed to a $30 billion industry. “We (India) have been big beneficiaries of it, with the IT services boom. The IT services market cap, $300 billion which is 1% of the global tech industry. We have a long way to go, and we need to now dream to be the paradigm setters, not just the people doing the current work at the back end. So, so that's the vision with which we have started Krutrim to really make India the global powerhouse,” said Aggarwal, adding that India generates 20% of the global data but stores only 10% of that data.