‘India produces 20 percent of the world’s data’: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal

Ola Founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal highlighted that India has 20% of the world’s population, produces 20% of the world’s digital data but only a tenth of it is stored here and the remaining data is sold to us in dollars after being processed by tech giants outside the country.

In an exclusive conversation with ANI, Aggarwal said, “Everyone in India pays in dollars. You know, if I, the broader perspective here, the irony is, India generates 20 percent of the world’s digital data because we have 20 percent of the world’s population. You know, thanks to 4g and Jio and all the mapping data that India generates. So we generate 20 percent of the world’s data.”

Ola founder stresses that India should actually produce more data because we are young.

“In fact, we, as Indians, our strength in the world of Artificial Intelligence will be that we are the largest population and data is what creates intelligence in AI. So we should actually generate more data because we are not only 20 percent of the world’s population but we are young,” said the CEO of OLA.

“So we are more active and therefore the per capita data output is also more. Today, we produce 20 per cent of the world’s digital data. This data is not stored in India,” he added.

Ola CEO lamented that 90 percent of data is exported to global data centers owned by tech giants.

“Only a tenth of it is stored in India. Ninety percent is exported to global data centers, which are largely owned by large tech companies. And they don’t… It’s processed into AI, brought back to India and sold to us in dollars,” he said.

He also said that 200 years ago, the East India Company exported cotton and is now exporting data and carrying intelligence from abroad.

“That’s right. That’s exactly what happened 200 years ago with the East India Company. They used to export cotton and import clothes from abroad. Now we are exporting data and importing intelligence from abroad. Neo-colonialism. Technological colonialism. Technological colonialism. Yes. I don’t know if that’s a word, but… People are already doing that,” the Ola CEO added. (ANI)

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