Why in news?

• S. technology giants plan to intensify lobbying efforts against stringent Indian data localisation requirements, which they say will undermine their growth ambitions in India.

What is data localisation?

• Data localization is the act of storing data on any device that is physically present within the borders of a specific country where the data was generated.

Advantages of data localisation:

• The main advantages of securing citizen’s data, data privacy, data sovereignty, national security, and economic development of the country.
• It acts as a solution for the advent of cloud computing that raises important questions on accountability of service providers who store Indian users’ data outside of the country’s boundaries, leading to a conflict of jurisdiction in case of any dispute.
• Also, minimal or deregulated governance on critical data, due to absence of localisation requirements, could be detrimental to India’s national security as data would be outside the purview of existing data protection legislation. This shall be avoided in in case of data localisation.
• In addition to these, India also aspires to become a global hub for, among others, cloud computing, data hosting and international data centres, all of which are prompting the government to enact data localisation requirements for accelerating the nation’s economic growth, especially in the sphere of digital technologies.