Make in India essential for survival

Geographically, where is your data stored? That is very important. If it’s in a foreign location, then not only do foreign players have access to your data, but it can create a legal mess in case of a problem or data retrieval requirements. It is strange that even today you will see government ads giving a Gmail address.

But for that the country needs to be packed with data centers, especially hyperscale ones, both by the governments and the private sector. India currently is not even in the Top 10 serious data center players in the world with even smaller countries like UK and Japan way ahead of us. India on its part did come out with a Draft Data Center Policy in 2020, but we have a long way to go.

Data Privacy and data security go hand in hand. Europe took the lead with the 2016 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that was implemented in 2018. While the Indian government came out with their Data Protection Bill in 2019, Europe is readying for an upgrade to its original regime.

Infrastructure is another issue altogether. In the olden days you required roads and bridges to network your country. Today you require data centers, servers, broadband lines, towers, etc to network the country. It is in the best interest of the nation that these are indigenous. The best example is the Chinese company Huawei, which has been banned by many countries in the world. Among other things, it has been accused of planting a backdoor entry for some of its products.

This is key for supply chain stability. Covid has laid bare the dangers of that thread bare. If you are fully reliant one even one thing in the supply chain, then the whole pack of cards will come down. We need to manufacture every kind of component within the country and that can be ramped up in case of an emergency.

Another thing we lack is Make in India Apps. Thanks to this, foreign countries, especially America have a hold over us. The number one phone messaging service in India is WhatsApp. In social networking, its Facebook. YouTube and Instagram rule the social video and picture world. Google Search is still the emperor. Politicians and government servants still go to Twitter to increase their influence.

This is quite dangerous for forget foreign governments, now even foreign companies can manipulate us. Algorithms, trends and profiles can easily be primed and manipulated to change the business habits and political beliefs of the people of India. They can interfere in our elections and policies without us realizing it. A subtle effective war can be waged against the nation while we may not even be able to do anything about it.