India needs to enact a law whereby whoever. foreign or domestic firm, collects data from users should be required to share it back to them when demanded, Nandan Nilekani, former UIDAI Chairman, has said. “This is a fundamental thing that we need as soon as possible,” Nilekani said at the Delhi Economics Conclave 2017 here on Saturday.
He was addressing a session ‘Data as the oil of the 21st Century: India's Response’.
Nilekani said that it was very important for India to have a strategic position around ‘data’. “This is not a technology problem, but a policy problem,” he said. His remarks are significant as it came at a time when India is contemplating enactment of a data protection law.
Stating that India needs a data empowerment law, Nilekani said that any company having business operations in India should be obliged to give data back to the users (whose data was collected by such businesses).
At the same time, Nilekani also clarified that the model proposed by him will not preclude the businesses from using the data.
“We have to build a strategy where we give the data power back to Indian people. The time is now because India is adopting digital at unprecedented pace”, he said. Describing data as the oil of the 21st century, Nilekani said that India was seeing frenetic data growth that the country will become ‘data rich from being data poor’ in next three years.
“We are seeing an explosion of data or a tsunami of data in a scale unprecedented in human history and everyone and everything will be connected”, he said.
He said there was a need to usher in the concept of “inverting the data”.
“Instead of the data being owned by the company or the government, can the individual whose data it is, can he or she own their own data. Can we invert the data pyramid so that the data belongs to the individual”, Nilekani said.
Nilekani said that the Government should through a new law give people control over their own data.
“Inversion of data means instead of data being used to sell things to you, data is being used to empower you. Users can benefit from their own data.
We have the infrastructure. We must make use of the infrastructure we have to do the inversion of data and put the user at the centre of it all”., he said.
Describing the current period as an ‘era of platforms’, Nilekani said that over the last 15 years increasingly the thinking of businesses is “how do we build platforms”.
“The big thing about Platforms is that they capture the data which is a by product of every interaction or every device and every person with that platform. Platforms are aggregating data and this has created huge business”, he said.
Nilekani said that seven or eight companies of the world (mostly in the US) are becoming massive aggregators of data on their respective platforms. “The more data you have you create better products, the better products you have you will attract more users and more users you attract the more data you will create and this becomes a virtuous cycle”, Nilekani said.
With this massive data pool, they can enter other markets, he added.