Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal has coined the term “techno-colonialism” to describe a modern phenomenon where India’s data is exported to global data centers, processed, and then repurposed and sold back to India.

In an interview with ANI, Aggarwal likened this practice to the historical exploitation of Indian resources by the British East India Company, arguing that while India produces a significant portion of the world’s data, the benefits of this data are largely siphoned off by foreign tech giants.

“Only one-tenth of that (data) is stored in India. Ninety per cent is exported to global data centers, largely owned by big techs. It is processed into AI, brought back into India, and sold to us in dollars. Yes, it is exactly what happened 200 years ago with the East India Company,” Aggarwal argued.

“They used to export cotton and bring clothes from abroad. Now we’re exporting data and bringing intelligence from abroad….Techno-colonialism. Techno-colonialism. I don’t know whether this is a word or not, but… It’s been done,” he further said.

There was a particular instance at where one of its recent news stories was repurposed abroad and served back to its subscribers based out of India, without necessary attribution.

Aggarwal argued that a solution could be to deal with Indian publishers, as global tech giants tend to do with other publishers worldwide.

“We as an Indian ecosystem need to realize that these battles are not legal battles. These are technology battles. And we have to build our own technology built on value systems of our own. For example, when I see the future of AI, we have a uniquely Indian idea called digital public infrastructure. UPI is an example of that. ONDC is an example of that,” he said.

India, he asserted, produces 20 per cent of the world’s digital data, referring to India’s equivalent global population.

“We produce 20 per cent of the world’s data. We also, as Indians, our strength in the world of AI…we are the largest population and data is what creates intelligence in AI. So we should produce even more data because, not just are we 20 per cent of the world’s population we’re also young. Hence per capita data production is more,” he said, referring to the advancement of internet services in the country.

Aggarwal believes that in the world of AI, data is the core and should be owned by the data creators themselves.

“We put data on our social media. It’s our IPR. It should be of the creator. And we have to encourage and nudge people to share data in a privacy-preserving way openly. India has the largest data, so we can bring a lot of data into the public domain… That can be used to create the largest intelligence possible,” he shared.

He also strongly believes that attributing original content or data creators is key.

“…we in India can create this paradigm, but we can only do it if all of society comes together. Companies like Krutrim need to exist for that. We need to evangelize this philosophy with stakeholders like the media, bureaucrats, etc. India will have to invest as a business ecosystem as government incentives etc. for a decade or two because we are very behind,” he added.

Krutrim, a Bhavish Aggarwal brainchild, generates text with an innate sense of Indian cultural sensibilities and relevance. It supports all 22 Indian scheduled languages and Indian contexts.

The Krutrim model can fluently switch between languages and discuss nuanced topics ranging from poetry in an Indian language to Bollywood movies and creative masala dosa recipes. It has been made available in beta version for consumers since February 2024.

In January 2011, he co-founded Ola Cabs with Ankit Bhati in Bengaluru. Aggarwal was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2018. Aggarwal received his Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2008.