The Decade of Data
No, wait, data is not ‘the new oil’. Nor gold. Data is the new sex, a sanskari strain. Everyone wants it, wants to control it and make money of it
ZOOM AWAY FROM our planet on a spaceship, and it fades into insignificance, a grey-blue speck with 8 billion people fighting over insignificant things. But that pale blue dot near an average sun is building up quite a database. By 2020, the amount of data on Earth should reach 44 zettabytes, each making up a billion terabytes. That’s 40 times more bytes than there are stars in the observable physical universe, 90 billion light years across.
When the history of this millennium is written, it’s very likely that its second decade will be remembered as the one when data exploded, driven by smartphones, 4G and the internet. Over 4.5 billion internet users are churning out a couple of trillion photos every year. They are uploading 300 hours of video every minute to YouTube, where 1.3 billion users watch 5 billion videos a day. Then there is Netflix, which accounts for 15 per cent of the world’s internet bandwidth, streaming into Indian homes, uncensored for now.
Nearly 700 million of those internet users are in India, almost all of them mobile subscribers. In the decade gone by, India’s mobile universe doubled from 600 million to 1,200 million subscriptions. More significantly, the country’s broadband user base went up from nearly zero at the beginning of the decade of data to 600 million today. It was slow going in the first half of the decade, with negligible wireline broadband, very little public WiFi, and early 4G offerings from a handful of operators led by Airtel.
Then came the pure-4G Jio in 2016, and everything changed—with extended free-trial 4G packs, and free voice calls forever (a ‘lifetime offer’ that ended in October 2019). Jio picked up 280 million customers in just two years. Fortune favours the brave and Reliance, and a series of policy changes and decisions helped fuel Jio’s spectacular rise, partly at the incumbents’ cost. There were 10 operators after Jio joined the party; three years later, there were just four, including the struggling government-run BSNL.
As we step into 2020, BSNL is on life support, Vodafone has been denying that it’s exiting India, and Airtel is struggling, looking for money to pay government dues. The operators are bleeding. They owe over $18 billon in licence fees and spectrum costs, and they get the world’s lowest revenues per user—often as low as Rs 100 a month. Driven to the edge, they have raised “the world’s cheapest telecom rates” by up to 40 per cent in December 2019, though these may still be the world’s lowest tariffs.
Along with 4G, Android should take some credit for fuelling India’s smartphone boom. The Google-owned software powers 94 per cent of India’s smartphones (against Apple’s 2.5 per cent share for iOS), and the 2.8 million apps on its Play Store, led by Facebook-owned WhatsApp, are a big driver of internet adoption.
THE POT OF GOLD IS DATA
These 600 million broadband users, and the other 600 million mobile users waiting in the wings, are a treasure trove of data. Almost all of them have Aadhaar, and many have bank accounts, including 376 million Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana basic accounts. All of this is generating a flood of data.
Everyone wants that data. All ministries and departments want to regulate it, and political parties know they must have it, but, barring the
BJP, haven’t a clue what to do with it. The ultra-rightwing nationalist Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) says a nation’s data must be stored and processed in that nation. A brilliant 19th century idea which, if implemented worldwide, would balkanise and destroy the internet as we know it, jeopardise India’s $137 billion software and services exports, and put at grave risk a quarter of its 4 million jobs.
Local storage ostensibly gives the government and its agencies easier access to citizen data, both for law enforcement and regulation—and for monetisation. In practice, the accessibility of data has little to do with where it’s stored, and depends more on legal frameworks.
The BJP used data, technology and social media outreach to come to power in 2014, and then again in 2019. It used its own data, social media data, government data (such as of direct benefit transfers). Just as data and social media were used in the US elections of 2016 to analyse, predict, strategise—and to game democracy.
For data is the new… no, wait, not oil. Or even gold. Data is the new sex, but a sanskari strain. Everyone wants it, and every ministry and regulator wants to regulate it, store it on-soil and make money of it.
In a shock for the government and political parties, the Supreme Court rained on the parade in 2017, making the right to privacy a fundamental right—a position the government had bravely fought against. A committee was set up, a privacy bill drafted, and by 2020, India may have a privacy law to protect citizens, with stiff penalties for breaches. But that law is set to give sweeping exemptions to the state and to all government agencies.
The last few years of the decade saw much ‘data governance’ legislation. The RBI fired its salvo in April 2018, mandating local storage of all payments data only in India, refusing to say why, and hardening its stance further when right-wing nationalist S. Gurumurthy of the SJM joined its board. A draft national policy for e-commerce talked breathlessly about regulating data, the new oil. As of midDecember, the personal data (privacy) bill awaits discussion in Parliament: it demands local storage of a lot of data, among other things.
But personal data is just one chunk of our universe. For the rest of it, another committee has been set up to discuss regulation of non-personal data. Global digital companies, already stung by new policies demanding expensive local storage and processing of data, braced for new laws that might direct them to share valuable proprietary data—with the government, local startups or the public. Google or Uber could be asked to share anonymised usage data. But the government didn’t wait for this committee, and put in that clause in the privacy bill, whose text was released on December 10. Take that, MNCs!
With the foundations the decade of data has laid, we should expect a data-surplus, hyper-connected next decade to be a playground of cyber crime and cyberwar. We have had a series of hacks affecting millions of our credit and debit cards. We have had hundreds of financial cybercrimes in India every day, with the UPI payment system a new favourite of hackers. But we haven’t scratched the surface.
Literate, upmarket users are falling for these hacks every day. In the decade ahead, the hacks will expand to another half-billion users way down the socio-economic pyramid, most of them illiterate, digitally illiterate, or language-challenged migrants.
And then there is cyberwar. We have barely begun to digitise and connect our big-ticket infrastructure, our power plants and transportation systems, traffic management, government. That’s up ahead in the next decade. Even as we wait for a new National Cybersecurity Policy in 2020, cybercriminals and cyberterrorists are standing by, fingers itching.