Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal Talks About India’s Digital Data and Techno-Colonialism

Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal highlighted that India, which makes up 20% of the world’s population, produces 20% of the world’s digital data. However, only 10% of this data is stored in India, with the rest processed by foreign tech giants and sold back to India in dollars.

In an exclusive chat, Aggarwal said, “Everybody in India pays in dollars. India produces 20% of the world’s digital data because we are 20% of the world’s population. Thanks to 4G and Jio, we produce a lot of data.”

Aggarwal emphasized that India should produce even more data due to its young population. “Our strength in the world of Artificial Intelligence is that we are the largest population, and data creates intelligence in AI. We should produce even more data because we are young and more active, hence per capita data production is higher,” he said.

He lamented that 90% of the data is exported to global data centers owned by big tech companies. “Only one-tenth of that is stored in India. 90% is exported into global data centers, largely owned by big techs. It is processed into AI, brought back into India, and sold to us in dollars,” he added.

Aggarwal also compared the current situation to historical colonialism. “200 years ago, the East India Company used to export cotton and bring clothes from abroad. Now we’re exporting data and bringing intelligence from abroad. It’s techno-colonialism,” he said.