By Uma Ganesh
In an era where digital and AI-led wars are dominating the world as also witnessed in our borders recently, digital sovereignty has become a crucial armour not only for economic independence but also as an important tool for security. The threats of digital colonisation are real and the repercussions could be worse than the physical colonisation efforts of the past. Just like the traditional colonisation efforts of the past, digital colonisation could cover a large population and could have long lasting implications.
Digital colonisation occurs when there is total dependence on other countries for digital technologies and or the data. It is perpetuated further when the data infrastructure is controlled by foreign countries as a result of lack of data protection laws or ineffective implementation of such laws.
Social media platforms, that are predominantly owned by the western world, carry their narratives in influencing people from around the world, bypassing the local socio-cultural norms and laws and making the local governments weak. Reliance on cloud infrastructure continues to be on AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure in many countries and this dependence may work against national interests. With ecommerce companies such as Amazon, Temu and several others, customers end up sharing personal and financial data which are used for analysis by the multinationals and the parent country has minimal control or access to such data to avoid this being used against its own citizens.
India is one of the few developing countries that has outlined a coherent strategy for resisting digital colonisation. The data protection laws underscore the importance of storing the data within the boundary of the country. ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) is a pioneering initiative that is being touted as an alternative to the ecommerce monopolies and is aimed at democratising ecommerce. The India stack is the first of its kind in the world in the digital public infrastructure model consisting of a collection of APIs and digital systems that enables in managing identity, payments, data and consent management.
The Make in India initiative is encouraging chip designers and manufacturers to consider setting up their manufacturing units in India, thus enabling India to build its own ecosystem required for defence, science and space related advancements. Another major focus has been to build our own large language model (LML) that is capable of supporting multiple local languages considering the linguistic diversity of the country. This would make AI truly broad based making it relevant for 1.4 billion population instead of just the privileged few.
In the context of global diplomacy with new power equations and alliances being formed, India has an exciting possibility to nudge countries to form a new coalition on the strength of affordable and ethical AI – one which has been built from scratch leveraging our large AI talent pool. While there are several challenges to be addressed, the promise of the pathway towards digital independence and data sovereignty for maximising the benefits of AI could be the compelling advantage for all the stakeholders.
