Rahul Gandhi backs data localisation in parliament

India has no data to feed to an AI, says Rahul Gandhi in Parliament. “Data is fuel for AI”, he said on Monday.

Congress MP from Rai Bareilly was speaking during the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address in the Lok Sabha during the ongoing Budget Session.

 “People talk about AI, but it’s important to understand that AI on its own is absolutely meaningless, because AI operates on top of data,” he said.

“Dataless AI means nothing”, he said, implying most of the Indian data is stored abroad.

“If we look at data today, there is one thing which is very clear, every single piece of data that goes that comes out of the production system in the world. The data that was used to make a phone, the data that is used to make electric cars, the data that is used to make basically all electronics on the planet today is owned by China, and the consumption data is owned by the United States,” he said.

In China, the consumption data is owned by their own country.

“In India, companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram X, they own our consumption data. So if India wants to talk about AI, it has to first answer the question, what data is going to power that AI?” Gandhi said, stressing the need for indigenous database sources to feed AI.

India doesn’t have that data.

“Neither does India have production data, neither does India have consumption data. We have handed our consumption data to big American companies, and the production data, we don’t, we don’t have any way. So what would that vision look like?” he asked.

India has 20% of the world’s population and produces 20% of the world’s digital data. But only a small portion of it is stored here and rest is offshore.

Most of the Indian data is stored in global data centres owned by big tech giants.

India is working on data localisation. Data localisation means storing and processing data within a specific geography.