In a recent conversation between Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO of Ola, and Vani Kola, founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, Aggarwal gave an example of how India is exporting most of its digitized data to companies abroad such as OpenAI or Google, and they are selling it back to Indians, comparing it with what happened 200 years ago with the East India company. 

“India generated about 20% of the world’s digitised data,” said Aggarwal, while also adding that only 10% of it is stored within the country. “90% of that is stored outside India.”

“The irony is that we create the data, but we don’t own the data. We don’t even store the data in our country,” Aggarwal continued, adding that India’s data is exported from the country into global data centres and processed for intelligence by OpenAI and others, and then sold back to us at a dollar rate.

He said that this sounds similar to how East India Company during the British rule of India used to operate with the textile and cotton industries. “Today is not a world for colonisation but this is exactly the same thing happening all over again,” Aggarwal added. 

The problem that he notes is that India cannot run without Google or WhatsApp or any other product imported within the country. “It will topple the government,” he added.

However, Aggarwal believes that there’s a discontinuity with the advent of AI, where Indian companies can build something like Google or OpenAI and compete with the international market, which is also not sitting ducks. “But we have an opportunity,” said Aggarwal. 

With AI, Aggarwal pointed out a problem that since AI would be pervise in our day-to-day lives, companies such as Meta or Google, can easily program people’s minds without even the need of a human creator. 

This is similar to how the Ola chief was in the spotlight for weeks for saying that he does not want ‘pronoun illness’ to reach India, for which he received major backlash, but was also supported by many for the views.