India's digital advancements | Full Q&A with Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MoS Electronics & IT

However, more than the technology and stack, the power to empower that these DPIs represent is certainly something that has caught the imagination of most countries in the world.

A: Most of what India is saying as the president of G20 to the countries of the G20 and to the countries outside that who are invitees to it, is something that is deeply acceptable to countries. We really believe that digitisation and the power of technology should be available to the Global South as much as it is available to the larger countries.

The narrative for several decades that technology and innovation were rooted in some countries and some companies needs to be transformed where more and more open source platforms make it possible for even the smallest countries to have durable ambitions of becoming digital nations, creating digital economies for themselves. So, the message that India is giving in this G20 presidency backed by its own case study over the last nine years is certainly that is going to be reflected in this ministerial declaration tomorrow.

A: I believe the bill is extremely foundational to our country’s vision of an India techade and a trillion dollar digital economy. It is a building block legislation, which on one hand, protects the rights of our citizens as well as creates a compliance framework that does not come in the way of innovation and growth.

On the issue of transition, we recognise in the government that the bill and the act represents a transition from a current regime to an absolutely new regime. The new regime of data protection is designed to create behavioural changes in the data platforms and data companies that process personal data of Indian citizens. We certainly want the transition to be orderly and not disruptive for both consumers and the companies involved including startups.

So we will sit with the industry and work out a relatively reasonable transition period and a framework. Of course you must understand that there are two very competing pressures here- one is, the industry saying give us infinite time and then our duty to the citizens to say that...these rights...that are now in the legislation should be available to you at the earliest. So these are effectively two opposite poles of pulls and pushes, but we will sit with the industry, we will sit with consumer groups and work out a process and a timeframe that will ensure that the entire transition is orderly. I think there will be two or three graded transition roadmaps, some for the more mature larger tech companies who can afford and put resources to transition faster and make a bigger impact on our consumers and some maybe startups and some entities which are less digitised take a little longer.

A: I don’t want to suggest that I have a view on that. Nothing that we have done so far has been without consultation. We will certainly have a deep meaningful conversations with the industry, with the consumer groups and evolve a framework. I don’t want to say that I have a view on it or somebody else in the room has a view on it. We will work on this in a very consultative manner, take views onboard, understand what is required for an orderly transition and then go by that.

A: I certainly don't want to necessarily explain every paranoid view of the legislation. There are things that I have heard that border on being reasonably absurd, saying that this empowers the surveillance state, it grants unfettered powers to government and certainly people are entitled to their views, but I certainly want to convey to your audience that this is a very well thought through, deeply consulted framework that has been built. None of this came out because we just woke up one day in the morning and said, let’s draft a bill.

On the issue of the Data Protection Board (DPB), I want to be very clear that the data protection board's role in the bill is a very narrow role, it is not SEBI, it is not a regulator, it is not a statutory body, it is a body that adjudicates the dispute between those whose personal data have been given to a platform and the platform who has in turn breached the obligations under the law. It is simply for want of a better word, it's an adjudicating body. In adjudicating bodies, performance and accountability is going to be determined by its outcomes, its conduct, its results. The DPB is a very digital organisation. It will have tremendous amount of disclosure and transparency requirements. The appeals of the DPB lie in a TDSAT, which will be chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge, and the final appeal lies in the Supreme Court.

So therefore, the process that has been designed to ensure accountability and transparency will determine the efficacy and the performance of the DPB. Sitting today and having these over imaginative views that this is a captive body and a not captive body, is to do injustice to the group of people who will do this, as a commitment to build an institution. The institution is going to be a very important institution to adjudicate disputes in the data economy for the next several years. We have absolutely every intention to make this a high quality, global standard, very credible institution. So our intentions, plus the fact that the design of the organisation creates a lot of oversight on what it does, and how it does, should today for the moment, keep people confident about the direction that we are going in. And then of course, down the road, if the DPB does not do a good job, everybody's entitled to his fair share of criticism.

A: I think in this transition period, a lot of these things have to be set up, the rules have to be enacted, the DPB has to be notified, we have to also ask for people to come and serve on the DPB. We have openly signalled that we don't certainly want this to be an organisation where there's only retired government or retired judges, we want young lawyers, we want youngsters to come in there and give 2, 3, 4, 5 years of their life to serve in these types of institutions that are modern, very fundamental institutions.

So we will see, as we go along. We also have a challenge of bringing in talented people to serve there. So it's not just about designing, it's also about attracting good committed public service oriented talent to serve there.

A: Blocking in this legislation is a very narrow blocking, it is for those who repeatedly violate the law. So if you read the construct there, if there is a platform that has breached the law, it gets penalised by the DPB. Then if it does it again, it gets penalised again by the DPB. And we think that it's a good power to have to, in a sense, create a deterrent to a platform that may have figured out a way of gaming these penalties to say that look, it is not just that we will penalise you, but if you have repeated conduct of breaching the law, we also have the power to block you from the internet. We certainly don't want the internet to have players that are repeatedly violating the law. So that power is there in the government, whether the government exercises it, on what occasion does it exercise it, the government will decide.

A: I don't want to get into a debate with judge or a justice, that's a failed proposition from the very beginning. Let me just explain what we have done and then people are entitled to their views. Right to information is not right to personal information. The Right to Information Act requires a public servant or those in public life to disclose what they have to disclose under the law is intact, it is untouched. But the right to information cannot mean if I am in public life, or you are in public life, that somebody can query me on my blood group, what illness I have.

A: But that is the only amendment that the right to personal data protection. The right to privacy is a fundamental right. And the right to information cannot be used to infringe that, that's all.

A: In the larger public interest that is the point I am making, that the right to information is not touched. But those who try to conflate right to information as being right to personal information, are the people who are going to have a problem. For example, if I am a public servant, and somebody wants to know my assets or whatever, or any indication of conflict of interest, that certainly doesn't mean that they have the right to know what my blood group is or what my daughter's residential address is or whatever. So that is the only amendment that has been done. Otherwise, the efficacy and all the rights under the Right to Information Act, in terms of the accountability and disclosure of a public servant is intact. There's absolutely no change in that.

A: This is not so much about plate or not, the Prime Minister's vision is very clear, we have to get to a trillion dollar digital economy by 2026. The digital economy today is at about 11 percent of total GDP. We want to get to 20 percent. The digital side of our economy is growing at about 2.8 times the normal economy. Now, one of the enabling requirements that we have is good global standard legislation, a framework of laws that allows our innovation economy to grow on unimpeded. The IT Act, which is the principal legislation today is 22 years old. So I think we can all agree today that in the world that we live in a 22 year old legislation, and that legislation does not even mention internet is not necessarily the best thing for our young startups and our innovation economy.

So we are, we are working nonstop on that. I think sooner rather than later, and as early as this month, we will start the process, we will get a draft out. We have already done for the first time in the history of India pre-consultation of the legislation. So we have gone around the country and spoken to the stakeholders and said, what do you want in the new legislation? We have collected a lot of information, we have designed the legislation and we think we will have the first draft out for you to critique.

A: I can't. It is a new modern bill, but it certainly will look at the internet comprehensively, it will look at the internet through the prism of the various types of intermediaries. In the year 2000, when we legislated the IT Act, the concept of an intermediary was anybody between the consumer and the internet. Today the complexity and the diversity and the vast expanse of the internet leads you from AI intermediaries to e-commerce etc. So we think there's a need to understand that and define that.

We also want to address the issue of user harm. Openness, safety, trust and accountability are the principles for us in legislating and rulemaking. We think on the user harm side, there is a need to really comprehensively define what the rights of citizens are, and what are the no go areas for platforms.

A: Let me be very clear, I think from the get go this was communicated incorrectly. This is not about import restrictions at all, this is not about licensing at all. This is really our attempt to create a framework of import management. We want to regulate, essentially, at a time when we are at an inflection point of the digital economy growing and the digital penetration of digital devices in India really ramping up and growing rapidly. We want to be extremely careful about the sources of the devices. So this is really an import management framework. We want to be very careful about what is the hardware coming, where is it coming from? We want to be clear that we want more and more trusted hardware in our digital economy, whether it's a server, whether it is a cloud, whether it's a laptop. The cloudification is now expanding so rapidly that we think that India is going to be one of the largest procurers of data center servers. So keeping all that in mind, we want to create a framework where what comes into the country, or what is deployed in our ecosystem is really trusted products. So therefore, this is actually an import management system. Of course in the process, we want to encourage more and more of the server brand's and the server companies and the laptop and device companies to manufacture in India and if not manufacture in India at least go to a trusted place where they manufacture and which is comfortable to us. So I think this is more of an import management framework.

I accept that because of the way we maybe did not communicate it, or we communicated it incorrectly, there was a lot of unease in the industry. I quickly met them the next day, and explained to them what our intentions are, and that we will take these intervening period of 90 days or 60 days, as the case may be to try and do something that achieves government's goals, government's policy objectives of more domestic manufacture, more trusted products in the domestic ecosystem, as well as their own goals to have their supply chains not being disrupted.

A: We will see if that is required. We will certainly not do anything without consulting the industry and we certainly don't want to do anything that is disruptive. If we want to transition to a new framework of more trusted products, more domestically manufactured products because they are more trusted, we will do so in an orderly manner and with the industry onboard.

A: I don't necessarily disagree with the characterisation that the two are linked. And I think that's a fair misunderstanding to have. And that is why I said this is about our mistake in communicating it. This is not some hammer way of making people manufacture in India, I can assure you that. That is why I have taken some pain to explain that our larger goal is to ensure that at a time when India's digitisation is really accelerating, that the components, the systems that are now deployed in India are really trusted. We certainly don't want to be in the situation where countries like in the West find themselves having already invested and then having to wind back what they've already invested in and saying no these networks or these systems are not trusted anymore.

Please understand, the other important trend here is, even on the core IP networks, the 5G, 6G networks, the composition or the intensity of IT and hardware systems are going to go up with the virtualisation of these networks and Open RAN and all these.

So this is the right time to create an import management framework, create incentives for domestic manufacture, but certainly be able to regulate sources where the imports come from.

A: It is a brilliant PLI scheme. It has worked wonderfully well. When Tim Cook dropped by recently and met me, he said one of the big reasons why Apple was able to ramp up so quickly in India was all the years of policymaking and inputs that went into creating this enabling framework in India, leading up to their arrival in India. So I think the PLI for smartphones is really a template for other PLIs. It has certainly reset our ambitions on where India wants to be in terms of the electronics manufacturing, global supply chains and GVCs. We have set out a goal of $300 billion of manufacturing by 2026 with $120 billion of exports. So It is clearly something that is making us very much more confident because understand where we were in 2014, we were importing 82 percent of our mobile phones, we had zero exports and we had absolutely negligible presence in the electronics global GVCs or the global supply chains. Here we are today, almost 100 percent of our mobile phone consumption is made in India and we have exported in last year one lakh crore of Apple and Samsung phones. So in a way, this is a very important demonstrator of our capabilities to these large number of electronics companies around the world that are seeking to diversify their manufacturing supply chains. Cisco has now set up in India, we are hearing the legendary Elon Musk looking at India for his legendary product, the Tesla. So there is no way today anybody in the electronics global supply chains can ignore India as a possible alternate or a possible diversified hub for manufacturing.

A: I don't have any insight, but I have a highly developed sense of intuition and common sense. I think India is certainly a very viable and attractive place for Tesla to manufacture. And I hope that comes true.

A: Semiconductor is like the frontier in a lot of ways. I am sorry to use a rhetoric like that or metaphors like that, but it is certainly the cutting edge of technology in the whole ecosystem of ideas and innovation. I like to say it's where science and engineering intersect. It is an area where India has over the last 65-70 years repeatedly either ignored the opportunity or not done what it should have done and lost opportunities. There's a whole history that I don't want to bore you with, but certainly from 1957 from Fairchild Semiconductors, first packaging proposal to the mid 2012 Intel proposal for packaging, we have just ignored it. So in the last 15 months, we are sort of trying to make up for all of those lost time. And I think even if you're a hard nosed cynic, you will take a look at the last 15 months and give us a report card and you will certainly give us an eight out of ten or nine out of ten in terms of how it has gone from almost zero to now an ecosystem that has over 30 plus design startups doing cutting edge work for next generation chips. We have a global major setting almost the first important building block for manufacturing which is the Micron plant, which is a global major and making memories and NAND chips that go into every data center and every mobile phone.

We have launched in the first year itself, a deep academic curriculum for developing 85,000 PhDs, postdoctoral, masters in the whole material science, physics, chemistry space. Shortly we'll be announcing an India Semiconductor Research Center. So, we have to run to make up the lost ground. And the best evidence of the pace at which we are progressing and the credibility is what I heard in the second Semicon India conference in Gandhinagar recently, which is that the question has moved between why India to why not India? The Prime Minister said the same thing there as well in his speech that every large semiconductor, small semiconductor company today attends Semicon India Conference, every brand, and that in itself should tell us the deep interest that they have for India as a semiconductor now.

A: Be confident, we will succeed.

A: First of all, it's not policy unpredictability, as much as it is a new space totally. There were no policies for it. And because there were no policies for it, there were a lot of bad actors that basically came in here and did things that were absolutely wrong and illegal and bad. I won't mention names, but there are companies that I know personally that have absolutely gamed the system and created such a credibility problem for the entire sector, with their conduct and what they have done in terms of violating GST and taxation and so on. But be that as may, let me talk about where we are today and where we will go. I want to say this with absolute clarity, the Prime Minister, the government is committed to growing the online gaming sector. We think it's an important part of the digital economy goals we have. We will certainly focus on encouraging the growth. We have created a framework today of rules that defines what is permissible online gaming. So we have basically said, games that deal with addiction, that have user harm or involve wagering and betting are not permitted in India, so we've clarified that. Now, I have had discussions with the finance minister, we've explained where we are in terms of the progress of these regulations. And she's open for MeitY to go back once the self-regulatory bodies are notified, once there is some stability and predictability about what the online gaming sector will look like, for the matter to be considered. So I have requested that and she's absolutely open and the GST Council I have spoken to Conrad Sangma as well, that this is what we are doing, we have kept them informed. So I think we should be optimistic. I don't think we should think of this as some death knell. This is certainly what happens when you venture into areas where there is no existing, clear, transparent framework. So I think part of the problems today are that people have taken these risks, ventured in areas where there is no framework and are, in a sense waiting for the framework to evolve.

A: I don't want to comment on what the finance minister or finance ministry has said, that is certainly beyond my pay scale to comment on that. But I certainly want to tell you and assure those through you that nobody needs to look at this as a death knell. This is what is natural progression and evolution of a framework. We are working very hard to get this done. And I can assure you on behalf of the Government of India and MeitY that we will work very hard to communicate this new framework to those in the GST Council and the finance ministry that need to understand this.

A: Now I fly in Air India as a passenger.

A: I haven't flown for some years because the little time that I get from the responsibilities that I have, I try and spend with my family. So I haven't flown for quite a while, but if you ask me how many hours have I clocked? I've clocked over 450 hours.

A: I'll explain to you and I think this is important for people to understand, I actually think, I'm like a grey hair veteran of this space. I have clocked over 35 years in the tech space, that this is certainly the most exciting time ever for India. If you're in the tech space as an investor, spectator, participant, employee, startup, it is the most exciting time and as a minister it is such a privilege for me and such a great high for me to engage with young startups, who constantly blow my mind in terms of how creative they are, how far ahead they're thinking.

When I was at the G20 yesterday, I met startups who are working in bioinformatics, and they are looking at artificial intelligence as applied to the whole health space, it was just amazing the confidence and the creativity that is on display all around the country. So it is our absolute privilege and pleasure to be where I am today. And I think I must have done some great karma in my past life to be able to get this opportunity.