When it is put up as a suggestion by an august committee, it seems to make eminent sense. Our data should be with us. It also appeals to our sense of sovereignty and our patriotic spirit. And since it is a truth universally acknowledged that videshi multinationals are evil and are Machiavellian conspirators, it makes even more sense to ensure that they don’t spirit away our valued and valuable data and violate Indians and ‘Mother India’.
But, as an empiricist, I was thinking about the practical implications. Let’s assume that soon we will have a billion people with smart phones. Let’s assume that half of them send out two video clips each day to four of their friends. That is a billion video clips to four addresses each. That means four billion video clips of data every day. You can do the multiplication as to what this means for data in a year, taking into account the fact that on holidays, which are numerous in our fair land, people will send many more than just two video clips to four recipients. Do remember that videos are data-rich, not like old-fashioned texts. And all this data needs to be preserved in data centres in India. We will, of course, end up having thousands of data centres, which, by the way, are not labour-intensive as they will be manned by robots—so no employment dividend there. These data centres will consume electricity, lots of electricity. And they need to run 24×7, which is tough to do with solar power. So we will have hundreds of coal- and oil-based power plants. Since we have done a brilliant job of funding, building and running economically viable power plants, all of which are servicing their bank loans impeccably, this should be an easy and pleasant task for us.
We will not meet our Paris commitments. But if the US can pull out of Paris, why not India? After all, we are a bigger, and most certainly, a better democracy than the US. From a Ricardian comparative advantage perspective, it makes sense for us to outsource these data centres to Alaska, Greenland, Finland etc. They can worry about electricity and warming the globe. If we look at the problem through the lens worn by a software architect, there are hundreds of solutions we can come up with where links, clues, trojans, meta-data, audit trails are preserved in India, enabling easy access of data from abroad whenever we need it. We can create Sherlock Holmesian solutions that can elegantly and easily ensure that evil multinationals cannot secretly stow away data in labyrinthine caverns in King’s Landing or in the Shire. But, are we willing to discuss practicalities or are we interested in asserting theoretical hyper-patriotism which might hurt us?
The response is not to answer the question, but to point out that China keeps its data in China. And what is good for China must be good for us. It is entirely possible that the Chinese are retreating into Qing-era chauvinism apropos of the superior middle kingdom—the attitude which created problems for them in the first place. Do we need to imitate this Chinese trait? There are other traits we can consider—for instance, how to run ports efficiently, or how to encourage factories to scale and not opt for dwarf options, or how to move from being an arms importer to a large arms exporter. Why do we need to imitate them in the area of data management, given that we are actually ahead of them in constructing frugal and sensible software solutions which can help us achieve our ends apropos of data, without any need for posturing on sovereignty?
I submit, for the consideration of patriotic countrymen and countrywomen, that we have enough problems to solve. Plastic, the Ganga, non-performing assets, and urban traffic come to mind rather randomly. We do not need to impose on ourselves the extra burden of building mammoth data centres in our country. We can outsource them to others who will end up competing ferociously and giving us the benefits of marginal cost pricing in a business stacked with fixed costs. And if, for some reason, we end up having a comparative advantage in data centres, they will come without any mandate needed. And then, others may outsource data centres to us. In actual fact, what is likely to happen if markets are allowed to operate sensibly, is that physical data centres and attendant robots will remain in Alaska and Iceland, and will be “managed” from Bangalore, Pune, Gurgaon,Chennai and Hyderabad. I am letting you into a little secret—this is already happening.
We have an old tradition in our country of cutting off our noses in order to spite our faces. We also rarely worry about practical consequences as long as we get it right in principle—as long as the “policy document” (a favourite expression of ours) reads well. Just think of the preamble to our second five-year plan which initiated our descent into planned poverty. It was elegantly written and appealed immensely to our need for patriotic self-reliance. Perhaps, this time around, we can take some time to examine where our strengths and interests actually lie and look for a resolution which may be theoretically flawed in pandering to our sense of sovereignty, but which, in practice, achieves what we want. Let the data go wherever. Let us ensure that we have audited software systems to track what we need—no more, no less.
The writer is a Mumbai-based entrepreneur. Founder and former CEO of MphasiS, he is at present executive chairman of Value and Budget Housing Corporation.
