Individual Rights, Data Protection As Important As Boosting Innovation Economy; India Strikes Balance: MoS IT

The debate around data has shifted from its usage or exploitation to 'guardrails' that can protect users, and India is firmly committed to striking a balance between innovation and the rights of individuals, their privacy and data protection, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Thursday.
    
The India stack is growing deeper and wider at the application level, he said adding that here in India, digital is all about inclusiveness. 
    
Chandrasekhar, who is the Minister of State for Electronics and IT, was speaking at the Economist Impact B20 Forum.
    
The minister said the India stack has generated a "tremendous amount of interest" among nations, and 11 countries are in the process of deploying India's Digital Public Infrastructure in whole or parts. 
    
He said the age-old narrative about government being dysfunctional has been "turned around" over the last nine years by technology and digital public infrastructure created and successfully demonstrated by India.
    
"Countries around the world that in the past depended on having to sign multi-billion dollar contracts with global System Integrators are now seeing better, faster, cheaper way of digitizing their own government, and their relationship between government and citizens," he said highlighting the global interest in India Stack.
    
India is expanding the depth of its digital offerings, and in the next two years, there will be no service that is not delivered on digital public infrastructure, Chandrasekhar said.
    
On data, the minister noted that the conversation has swung from how data is new oil to the other side where privacy and data protection are important issues for citizens.
    
The "pendulum has swung all way" from saying data is to be used or exploited to conversations now that it is good that data is the new oil but there have to be guardrails and some do's and don't on how data is used.
    
The minister made it clear that "there certainly has to be symmetry in the relationship between the individual whose data we🍸 are talking about, and platforms."