 Today actually we will be discussing not so much the NPD framework in fact not at all the NPD framework except for a few concepts from that framework but we'll be trying to understand something else that is happening in the context of in the context of the way in which technology is being rolled out and the kind of imagination that is being used that's being deployed in bringing technology to this country and that's become important not just for this country but for many other countries because we are not merely doing it here the those who are creating this are also exporting it to many other countries it's being done directly to African countries to Latin American countries it's also been being done through the World Bank it's being done through multilateral institutions of that kind so we need to understand what it is and the big pride of what's happening in India today is that it's the first time that many things have for instance it's the first time that there is such a large IT database that has been created nowhere in the world do you have an IT database of this kind nowhere in the world do you have a program of financial inclusion like you have financial inclusion even as we start and since Ben is here I should just say that my understanding of financial inclusion is being informed about various aspects of finance including credit including savings including what you can do with it and what can be done with what you have but of course in this country as I see it it's been reduced to having a bank account and having some money is put into it and learning how to take them out of it if you're able so but this idea you know that financial inclusion because we have such a large number of bank accounts that it's the largest that it's ever happened in the world that this is the first country where we went to the extent of being cashless paperless and presenseless anywhere in the world so there are many firsts that you know the largest biometric database so all these you know the grand ideas that the grand notion that we are we have the largest and the first of all of these things is one way in which we've been introduced to what is happening in our midst so it's the so today at the focus of what I'm going to do today and this is something that's been holding my attention for some time now is this idea of eminent domain and eminent domain sounds like a technical term and it's something that is lawyers we use all the time so I should just say that it's actually a pretty simple notion it's a doctrine that was created so that the state the state could take private land to use it for a public purpose on payment of compensation so the idea was that there will be various circumstances where I mean land is not owned by the state the state can only take some land and you put it to another use but it doesn't own any land at all that's how it began so but the state will have the authority to be able to take private land and put it to use for a public purpose on payment of compensation there are various you know 17th and 16th and 17th century philosophers who've written about this political philosophers who've written about this including Hugo Grosius and Rousseau so we've all sat and looked at that to see at that time what did it mean and what has what has it become since I find that a lot of us who work on technology are not fully aware of the kinds of the kinds of doctrines ideas notions which have developed in law and in political philosophy which is actually determining or which will either it's determining the way things are happening around us today in relation to technology and in relation to data in relation to our uses of technology and the uses that are being imposed on us we are also not fully cognizant of how people have responded to these various notions and doctrines so the idea that the state can take private land and convert it to a purpose that the state thinks is a public purpose how have people responded to that how have institutions responded to that and the the question that could well be asked is why is this relevant in the context of technology because the uses to which technology is being put the various kinds of relationships that are being developed and which are evolving between date between technology and technology controllers between technology controllers and the state between the state and the resource that's being created all these have already been experimented in political philosophy before they are not new so to think that we are seeing it for the first time in in humanity's existence that is not correct so just a little bit to say that this is not really to do with whether it's technology or land or minerals or water it is to do with authority power and control and that is common never mind what we are looking at so power authority and control are the three concepts which will help us understand what's happening in the context of technology just like we understood it in the context over a period of time it took us some time to understand it in relation to land and there have been many ideational conflicts and resolution of conflict that has happened in the context of land over especially over the past 30 40 50 years why is that period important because it was an approach it was a period of decolonization post colonization where we were no longer being governed by a foreign power but we were governing ourselves and so it the kind of engagement we had with the state and what we could expect from the state also changed we have a constitution now and a lot of the conflicts of ideas are located in the constitution so those who know technology need to know the constitution and those who study the constitution need to understand how technology controllers understand technology and what kind of imagination they have it is my broad premise that we need a completely altered imagination I don't think we can proceed with this imagination and a simple reason for that is that the excitement with which we started adopting and using technologies at the beginning of this century has changed dramatically where today we are facing a lot of anxiety when we think of these technologies and we are having to suppress those anxieties every time we use them we are also facing a situation where we feel that we are helpless in the face of this technology and helplessness is not a great way for any people to exist we are help you know being helpless or choiceless is not a way for any people to exist so there is it is to deal with this if the technologies and the way they've rolled out is producing anxieties and if it's producing choicelessness then there is something that is wrong with the way that imagination has gone and we need to alter that imagination this is the imagination of a set of people who have worked on this and produce this imagination there is nothing to say that there can't be other sets of people with other imaginations who will then either challenge these or contribute to these or try and dislodge this imagination while putting in its place maybe another or at least being able to demonstrate that this imagination anyway cannot continue so that's the I almost said simply stated and then said no I shouldn't say that so this is the complex you know kind of question that's floating in my mind and which I'm taking this opportunity to unburden on to you so now what was this about eminent domain eminent domain really started about land it also extended to the idea of the forest but it was also on the you know even the forest was seen as the forest which is on a particular land so it was about saying you know the colonial state was saying that we need to be able to keep you know we have various projects of development and expansion for which we need various resources and we can't if it belongs to some people for instance railways you know railways is like what today you call a linear project and if the railways had to be rolled out and if the if that project of development and expansion had to move on the state needed the power to be able to take land and anything that was on land in the way whatever came in the way so you find that and this is true of forest too so even the railways themselves for instance needed for the sleepers it needed forests and it needed the trees it should be quite clear that it is not the forest that it needed the trees so to capture that tree it cordoned off lands fenced off forests fenced off lands and said any tree here nobody else is allowed to get in there everybody get out whoever's there you are all encroaches when you're there and this now will best in the state and the state will manage and decide how to use this you know how to use these forests so we've come from there that's the heritage from where we have come and in 1894 there was a law that was passed called the land acquisition act which consolidated all these practices and for those who some of you are too young to have and maybe not in the same field too so you may not have noticed but actually you see them even today every other day in the paper you'll have something or the other that's happening there is a whole study and collection of information that's happening by a group called land conflict watch the conflicts are huge they are all over the country if you look at the map with where it's dotted you'll find that the dots are all over the country and often overlapping one with the other so this the what the land acquisition act did was it gave legal status to the power of the state to be able to take private land for a public purpose and to make it to bring it under the control of the state without any encumbrance this is an important concept to understand because we see that in the context of data that is it will be the land will be there will be a process there will be a notification that will be issued saying we want this land anybody can object then they will decide on the objection so the person who wants the land will be the person decide person the sense the entity which will be deciding on whether they should or should not have that land and then once it is decided there will be a compensation that's paid into the you know to pay to the person who's interested and that interest will seize from that day and after that it is all under the control of the state so this without any encumbrances is a very important notion that exists and we are seeing that being brought into the idea of data and personal information which when it reaches a certain point so when you reach the non-personal data framework you'll find that it is there it says that once it reaches you know once it reaches a certain point after that it's no longer anybody's it is free for everyone to use so in in the non-personal data framework this they call it non-rivalrous so it doesn't need it you know it means that not just one person needs to use it there is no rivalry everybody can use it so it's an extraordinary kind of thing to say that data at some point disengages itself from person and the person has no control over it it will be among those who are going to use it for creating businesses this is not like I said a new notion so this idea of cutting off the person from what belongs with them regardless of what is done with it after that is a notion that has existed for at least 140-150 years and we are seeing that come back in the context of data I just want to clarify one thing here that we know that there are all these questions that are going on which I think are extremely important and urgent questions about what Google Microsoft Amazon varies on whoever whoever you can think of who's got all these massive amounts of data about their ability to collect this data to retain this data to process this data to use this data and to abuse this data we've seen Facebook all of them we've seen this you know this whole thing happen over this period of time and the questions that are being asked about antitrust about monopolies about abuse you know about having done things that they ought not to have done these are all questions that are here that are here today and they have to stay till they are resolved but it is important to remember that these companies they became what they did because they were allowed to do what they wanted and there were no rules stopping them from doing it then so we are fighting with both our hands tied at the back and with very little on our side except the knowledge that these that if these companies take over our lives there is no life left I mean it's really like handing it over to them and that's it after that you know you can be controlled by them like they tell us everything is convenient everything is efficient it's convenient for you not to have to go and put your signature it's convenient for you not to have to be pressed and it's convenient now for you not to have to think for yourself these companies will think for you Amazon will tell you which book to read Google will tell you which article to read you really don't have to do any thinking or working for yourself and this is presented to us as an advantage that's being given to us in our lives I have no clue how I mean why would I have it's like converting many things into vestiges in the human body and in the human mind so it's an extraordinary time and I think the battle that we are fighting with these major companies is a very important battle it's also a very important battle because we are seeing their collaboration with the state if it wasn't obvious before I think Snowden has opened it out and given to us bit by bit about what this means so this kind of collaboration in which we are not apart but off which we are apart that's you know that's something that is truly extraordinary and needs to be just not just urgently but I mean we need something dramatic happening in detail what we are discussing today is there are little parts of that that will come into this but largely it is the other aspect of this which is developing and in which India has taken a lead now on the the idea of eminent domain therefore like I said in the beginning was only about private land being taken for a public purpose on payment of compensation it had to be there for private land what about land that is not private that question never really got resolved and after independence in the early years in 1951 we asked this question you know this question was asked interestingly by the only people who have the wherewithal to ask the question which is Amindar's they raised the question saying who is the state is the state a super landlord is it some kind of an owner or a super owner that it is above the law he doesn't have to conform to anything at all everything belongs to it and what is this public purpose you're saying you want to take it away from us for what the for what was answered by saying that listen breaking down these structures feudal structures doing away with this Amindari system is the public purpose but on the question of who is the state the question has really remained unanswered for a very long time the when the uid litigation was on and we brought that question up in you know the question was brought up it was asked to say who is the state within the constitution what is the relationship of the state to a people is it a relationship of where the state will dictate and people will act which means that there are limits to the rights of people but there are no limits to the power of the state or is it the converse that there are limits to the power of the state but you have to have as expansive an understanding of the rights of people as is possible the job of the state is to expand the rights of the people the question of course in the context of technology and the way it said is which is not a question at all I think is convenience more important than rights or rights more important than convenience I think I can't think of anything more conveniently in life than rights so I don't know that that's a question at all but when you so when you look at what the when you look at what it is that happened with this with court saying till about 1950 till the 51 judgment came in between 1894 and 1951 there had been a number of decisions where basically they had said if the state says that it is a public purpose then we can't ask any question about we just we will accept that it's a public purpose so the court the state decides what is a public purpose and so the idea of challenging a public purpose became very difficult the second thing that happened was that the idea of imminent domain itself stopped having the capacity to be questioned because it became entrenched that the state can take land for a public purpose the only thing was about compensation and how much should be paid as compensation that by now we know those anyone who studied constitutional law will know that battling over how much should that compensation be is like we have lost the battle because we are handing over enormous powers over resources which are very important and significant to people to the state now what to say that the state could do with it the state could therefore structure what it wanted to do with land the state could decide what the public purpose would be the state could take over that land the state may or may not use that land for the purpose for which it said it could use it it may or may not use that land at all but it will no longer be yours it will not return to the person for whom that to whom that land belongs this is a very important concept and it's one of those you know after the narmada movement started against the dams against the sadhas or over dams it said that time that the question started being raised about imminent domain but even then people were just saying don't be unkind to the people who are there don't be unkind to the affected population don't have policies which will destroy the lives of the affected population at that time people were still not saying you don't you state don't have the power to do it you don't have the authority to do it the constitution doesn't give you that power so where are you getting this power from to take everything away from the people and to make that which is common lands like grazing land or anything that doesn't belong to a person to be treated as if it is state property it is not state property that battle is an important battle for us to go back to to understand what is being what you know what is at stake when we say that data can just become public everybody can use it you'll have multiple startups and you know and it's not your business any longer what is being done with your data so it's important for us to see that the it's also interesting that in the case of land just like it's happening in the case of technology law came much after the practices were established and that is very significant which means that we have no norms and we will then make the law on the basis of what whoever it is whether it's the company or the government or you know whoever has the wherewithal to be able to intervene in this whatever it is that they think should be in the law after having experimented with it that is when the law will be made which basically means law is not normative law is made up for the convenience of those who want to use whatever resource exists so and that has very serious consequences as you can imagine for data too for instance the UID didn't have a law it started in 2009 it started collecting everybody's data it started commanding people to use that data but there was no law and if people hadn't gone to court and got a stay order even normally there would have been nothing that they could have relied on and if the court at that stage had said well it's too early I don't really know what to say one could have understood why not because for the court to understand the technology can produce these kinds of effects it would have taken more time than it would have taken for instance for a person who is in technology sitting there and watching so it is extraordinary that the court did understand that there was a problem and in 2013 gave you know stayed the idea of mandatory industries even which was you know even which was breached all the time but some normativity had been introduced because of that so I just wanted to pause at this time to say that there is a distinction between normativity and pragmatism Pragmatism depends on the person who has the power to be pragmatic it does away with other people's rights so we just need to remember what that can mean it's a very interesting thing I mean that it's a very long story the eminent domain and this land acquisition story but just to know this that till 1894 you had the law in 1927 you had a forest act which basically made encroaches of people who are on that land and then you had the forest conservation act which came in in 1980 which said that the decision to make you know the decision to be made about diverting forest land for a non-forest purpose will now vest with the central government and not with the states which basically meant that it was not to conserve forests as much as decide who will have the power to decide on diverting a forest for a non-forest purpose and then later you had the land acquisition act itself being amended and that is the 20 year period is something everyone should study because it required people beginning to understand what was getting lost because you had that old law and how it benefited no one who was affected whereas it was attempting there were experiments being done with what that land would be used for take the nano project for instance the nano project they started it in singhore singhore had a huge problem with it people protested they moved to gujarat the project failed but for those who lost their land it remains lost in singhore because they sent them away from there they've been able to retrieve some parts of it but it had already been worked on and there are all manner of problems with that so these are really what i would call burning the boats projects where you burn what was there before so that you can't go back to it whether you go forward or not a lot of technology projects today are like that the uid project is a classic of how it is like that as in fact is the financial inclusion project where the way it is being done now where you say everybody will have a bank account and money will be put into that and that's the beginning and the end of that so what that it's like you have no other means if an energy worker doesn't have a bank account which they are able to make work which means either your biometric has to work or your business correspondent has to have a training where they'll do something different you can't be paid in cash because now today that is seen just payment and cash is seen as akin to corruption so there are ways of thinking that have to change to introduce all of this one of the very significant things in this in land acquisition is that you know it used to people work working on land acquisition used to call this you know who are opposed to land acquisition of this kind used to call it robbing the rich to robbing the poor to give to the rich so it's like an inverse robin hood you know so why are you taking the land that the poor have and then handing it to the rich so that they can make something that may add to the gdp maybe it will but it doesn't benefit all those that you're throwing out of the system so various kinds of concepts developed around us the idea of marginalization in technology it's manifesting as exclusion and there it manifested as marginalization and over a period of time we found that marginalization didn't stay with the margins it kept expanding because they became more and more irrelevant to the development project so for those who were on that project they were not interested in those who were getting marginalized and that kept growing we are seeing signs of that already in the data project already i mean it didn't require a hundred years for that to happen we are already seeing that happen the other element of that you know which came after years of battle the 2013 law the land acquisition act that law is the first time that the law acknowledges project affected people and this is not people who've been affected badly by the projects these are people who been affected badly by the project the numbers have kept growing into millions over the years and they kept getting sideline till public action public call for action and movements from the ground demanded attention and said that you have to listen to what is being said what's happening to people on the ground you can't ignore those so there are people who are land owners and people who can show a legal interest in land they would get compensated to a certain extent because it was it wasn't replacement value it was market value market value will be on the basis of circle rates so you keep having various ways in which you reduce the cost to the project of displacing people the idea of development shifted into becoming the displace displacement project around the late 80s and early 90s and it was possible to demonstrate how many people millions of people and invariably it would be people who can least afford to get left out of the system who would suffer the most in this and we saw that happening in the land acquisition context and it took a lot of you know lot of negotiation and understanding getting people you know getting people in general to understand this to say that we have not just people who are losing land we are having people who are losing a lot which is not even recognized which is not even put into the computer and that is how you have in the 2013 law the idea of project affected people just think about what it means that 70 years after a 73 years after a no 63 years after a constitution you've had to include a category who got who got totally excluded from the development project over this period the question is can we afford to have another set of that happening with data there is one word that never gets spoken which is not relevant when you think about the land acquisition issue but which is supremely relevant when it comes to what is getting lost in the context of data and that is surveillance it is extraordinary I mean we all know of the book by Shoshana Zuboff called surveillance capitalism I don't think it is only about capitalism I think in India we have seen a very very interesting phenomenon which is common to what happened with land in land too the state was asking the especially since the late you know since the 80s and 90s the state was asking private industry to create more and more GDP so saying you have to create the pie from which we can distribute to others and we need you to do this so that we are a force to content within the world I actually think in the 50s and 60s I have a certain sympathy with what happened then because we were very very newly out of being colonized and we had to establish that we could exist on our own you know when Gandhi said leave us to God our anarchy that's what happened and we had to create our own something between God and anarchy and that's that was the project and it was many experiments and it was by the third five-year plan that they started recognizing oh there are people getting marginalized people who ought to be benefiting are having to become people who sacrifice for development and that should not be so you know we have seen these we've seen these processes through the years we've learned from those processes through the years in forest rites it was 2006 before the forest rights fact came in and the law says we this is a historic injustice that has been done these are words in the law historic injustice what was that historic injustice that you made people who were on land you know on land in the midst of forests you made people who were perfectly legal and who had every right legal is what legal is a constructed you know constructed entity right it's not there's nothing people live so these are people who are living there who through law were rendered illegal and they said for you know for about whatever 90 years 80 years we've been keeping you in this state and that is a historic injustice and they did not say they will give them land they said we will recognize your rights this is something that's happened as recently as 2006 so we can't say let's have 100 years of technology doing whatever it wants and then we will think of historic injustices historic injustice does happen projects do affect people exclusion and marginalization are built into these and in addition to what happened with and invariably the people who get affected are the people who can least afford to take this on themselves increasingly we are seeing the normalizing of various things that shouldn't even exist in a society and that normalizing includes the includes surveillance I'll just move to technology itself and I just want to say of you know the the idea that the next big GDP thing is going to come through data and what are the kind of systems that have been used to make this happen the first thing we find is e-government so the the story goes and I will for the moment I will still take it as a story goes Heather Brooks is a respected journalist so I would take her word for it but you should know that that's where it comes from that after the dot-com bust after the Y2K got over which still today nobody knows whether it was a hope or it was genuinely something whatever it was lots of companies made lots of money from it and they gained a certain traction for themselves and then you hear of technology companies approaching the EU and saying listen if if you're not going to be supported then we will collapse and you won't have that assistance either so the EU decides in their Lisbon meeting that they're going to help these technology companies survive and they are going to draw from it too that's that's when you see the beginning of well actually beginning and it's like a mushrooming of key governance projects around the world so when anything happens in every jurisdiction then I think we really need to sit up and take notice because it's coming from somewhere it's not coming from within so that e-governance project from that time on you find that it is technology controllers and those who profited from certain forms of technology who hold control over these systems and one of the things that is constantly done is to say is to make the state believe maybe rightly that the state has no ability to deal with technology so all that the state has has to be handed over to these private companies which will then help run the state and the state should let them run with whatever they have and make their own business out of this has become the pattern that we have here so unlike many other jurisdictions including the problems that we have with the Google's and Facebook's of the world here there is a collaboration between the state and technology control I think one thing we must acknowledge is that people who call themselves libertarians people who say that you know let's not have supervision from the state let's not have regulation we will do self-certification and the state should just step off they don't seem to exist anymore because what they are saying is step away from me but step into other people's lives so that I can have what I want which is how this whole technology project has gone on so mission mode projects are identified all of them have to become technology projects so it doesn't matter that we have a huge divide you know digital divide it doesn't matter that we don't have electricity in most parts in many parts of the country it doesn't matter that connectivity will be low but even more importantly it doesn't matter that literacy should be you know educational literacy should be our priority and without that this in any case will mean nothing the straight way impact of that is converting a citizen into a subject this is something we've been saying for a while and data seems to assist in doing this one of the questions and the way in which data is being handled one of the questions that has been you know that that we've been asking ourselves and finding answers to is why is it that artificial intelligence is becoming such a big deal now machine learning algorithmic learning you know everything is going to be taken care of by all of this why is it that it's coming now it seems to be coming now because on the one hand you have all these companies that are collecting all this detailed information about us and like you will know our Harari said in a recent talk that you know when you if you read your book on Kindle it knows how fast you read it knows how many pages you read at a time it knows when you stop it knows how long you take and with a little bit of addition of facial recognition just a camera on the Kindle it will be able to say whether your board reading it whether you're excited you know how you feel about the whole thing and it therefore is analyzing you whereas you are just living so it really knows more about you and your moods and how long you've taken than you know for yourself you're not keeping track of all this because that's not how people live so this you know this is one whole thing I got sidetracked with that but I just since I don't want to take more time than I should I'll just move on to say that see there are some ideas that have come up in this period which we need to interrogate very closely when land acquisition was happening and the eminent domain principle was being used by the state to take see they expanded the idea of eminent domain they said okay the doctrine itself says private land for a public purpose but actually all land in this territory I can decide what I want done with it so the state assumed more and more power onto itself not even authority more and more power onto itself and that's the way in which the state like all whether it's private land public land community land all of it became something that the state could control go to your NDPF document and see if you see some reflection of this in that document you will find that it is there you know and that's the introduction of the idea of community for instance only to say that community is too whole data and therefore we want to take it away from them is a very interesting phenomenon they've brought and it's come from people who are not anthropologists and therefore have no what to do with the idea of of community in this period you find a few new notions that have come in one notion that has come in is this idea of the state as a series of startups it's fascinating the idea is that and all of these have to do with the potential of technology so whether it is swachh Bharat whether it is a health national health mission in you can keep naming them I mean you'll find that there are a number that come like this where it's like a startup it will be handed over to an individual who's seen as a professional who will then constitute the team for himself and then enforce the project and get it done now in my understanding startups may fail or may succeed if they fail they disappear if they succeed then to the extent that they succeed it benefits somebody one of the fascinating things that I find about what is happening in the context of data is that it doesn't matter if a lot of it fails if 40% fails it's okay 60% will work so for whether it's for your GDP or whether it's for control or whatever it is for even 60% is fine in some cases maybe even 30% will be fine if you've had nothing before so all these failures of technology that you find in different places become irrelevant mainly because it was not nobody expected it to succeed and when they say oh nothing succeeds 100% I would agree but when something's that is supposed to cover a whole population and create an ID for instance for a whole population succeeds to heaven knows how much because it's never audited and you find a government circular which says that you know fingerprint may not work and that's what we are going to use for one nation one ration so if your fingerprint will not work and there are a whole series yours doesn't work your family's doesn't work there are only people above 60 and less than 15 there are disabled people there are people who can't get up and walk if all of these and if you're a migrant worker maybe with the kind of work you do your fingerprint won't work you can nominate somebody else to give their fingerprint for you so these are nominated identities even that is not acknowledged as a problem it is still seen as a solution so in many in data I find the distortions that are going to come in through algorithms and through machine learning is going to be huge because some people will get left out wrong data will be getting fed will keep getting fed in and you're going to have all of this happen and it doesn't matter because for business that is enough that level of accuracy is enough it is for people that that level of accuracy is not open this produces the second phenomenon of what's called a self-cleaning mechanism so the the systems can't undertake the responsibility of ensuring that what has been collected is clean good data but if you wanted to work for you if you want your bank account to work if you want your mobile phone to work if you want your income tax returns to be filed if you want to be able to do any of this and not get either you know become a criminal or to become have your money frozen or whatever then it is for you to make sure that your data is properly loaded onto the system the system may not cooperate so if you look at what's happening on GSTN today you'll find that the Chartered Accountants Association is going on a huge trial because the process that has been created the GSTN is not able to deliver what it's what it was and people are struggling Chartered Accountants are fed up I hear and of course I'm kidding now that many of them have gone bald out of pulling their hair out they do a little a day but it happens over a period of time right so this tells you about the non-performance of technology but it doesn't matter because the ambitions in this are different they are not about people being able to get what they want or it's not about facilitating it it is about making as much business as you can for the company so when we are looking at something like the non-data protection framework it is important to remember that there are certain things that they are saying one they are saying you are going to get separated from your data or your data is going to get separated from you then it's with us we are the entrepreneurs we are the startup geniuses and we are going to be making all these businesses and India is going to become this great up and to do that you have people who are planning these businesses who are sitting inside government and what does that government report I'll just read a few things that have come up the first is an idea of trickle up so we those of us who are really old and gray dealt with this idea of trickle down that is you create a sufficient pie and then if it's big enough then it will start trickling down so the important thing in the early years was to say that we really need to have a lot so that it can reach you know it will trickle down to even the poorest that didn't happen and we brought in a welfare state and we said okay we'll do redistribution trickle up is different and I'm going to just quote here but there is something happening in India that we need to recognize that is this is saying beyond the market so you have the market beyond the market there is something happening in India that we need to recognize which is that Indians will be data rich before they are economically rich thanks to everybody having smartphone sensors and so on so suddenly an individual has a digital footprint that is far more than the wealth he has to whom therefore the business models that will emerge in India will be those that allow people to take their digital wealth and convert that into economic wealth so my digital footprint will become your economic wealth and that is the trickle up so this is a notion that has been introduced where the whole non personal data framework is about this trickle up it's about saying all the data trickles up from every source that you can find that's one then the ambitions of collecting more and more data so that you know you're going to be some kind of a global whatever house is in the national health stack where they say it will potentially benefits to the central government it will potentially place India at the forefront of medical research in the world for the national health stack yeah the design is geared to generate vast amounts of data resulting in some of the largest health databases and then it's what you laughed at amika with secured anonymized data by now I think we know there is no such thing as anonymization especially when the three massive words that were produced of unique ubiquitous and universal I'm never tired of saying it because I think we need to remember what this is about every person being uniquely identified not necessarily by biometrics but actually by number ubiquitous which means put it in every database every database and universal because you can't exist without it you can't function without it and therefore you have these three this is the way by which corporate interest business interest technological business interest has entered government and told government to act so that it can garner all this data it's a very interesting time that it has come because with the present government they see privatization as the answer to everything it is only private companies that are going to be able to do this so whether it is in the context of disinvestment which started about 20 years ago or 14 years ago or it is in the context of companies which are going to do this you know like who has the capacity for instance to run an electricity station it's only going to be a private company airports private ports private things that were earlier seen as not even safe to hand over to the private are today being hacked over because the state sees its answer in privatization some of the resistance to the farm farm laws for instance is seen in fact people tell us these are not farmers laws please notice it is farm laws and it is because they see their answer when they say that farmers will get more money they they could even believe that it is this privatization that is going to produce more wealth in this process we've also had a shift happening in what we are in relation to all of this data so first when the the you know the terminology came along with the ui so it came with calling it said kyc just know your citizen then it became kyr which is know your residence then it became kyc again which is know your customer between knowing your customer and knowing your citizen that's where these rest and it is from that so knowing your citizen and knowing your customer has huge amounts of surveillance built into it it is being denied again and again and again now what is fascinating for me is that I think yesterday perhaps there was a the government has again given an idea that maps making of maps can be handed over to private agencies earlier it was something that only the state could do and others could adopt it but now they've said there are different kinds of maps you know that you need to have and these maps are being created for private businesses who want a certain kind of map it wants to know for instance where all the people are who want to go to a gym or who need to go to a gym and therefore have to be motivated to go to a gym so you make a map which will indicate where all these people are so that we can take our business to them maybe Zomato will say okay that's the place for us also to go because it means that that's where people are eating too much and therefore they need to go to the gym I don't know but it's that kind of personalized map that they are talking about and saying that this will help in the making of a smart city the smart city project has been you know debated endlessly but very few people from positions of authority listening is basically you know it it's meant to be efficient it has a huge surveillance factor built into and everywhere you'll find that they have to put in a token thing on privacy because privacy has to be talked about after the judgment of the court and I'll just have one little snide word at this point before I wind up which is that you know when the attorney general stood up and at one time the attorney general stood up and said what makes people think that they have absolute right over their bodies this was about biometrics and said what do you mean we tell you give you have to give this is a very strong eminent domain principle where the state is saying your body is mine and I will tell you what to do with it if I tell you part with your DNA you'll part with your DNA if I tell you you've got to give your fingerprint you've got to give your fingerprint so it's a very significant kind of statement demonetization was another time when eminent domain was practiced saying what you have belongs with the state the state will tell you where you have to give it and how much it will give back to you and what it will do with you after it's found out what you have or don't have very significant statement these are not just policy statements this is about a dramatic change in the relationship between a state and a people and that's what we and so now actually I find the non in this non personal data framework a sadly weak document not weak in terms of what it wants to do but it almost seems to be pleading to say please let us get all this data you know we'll try and do some business out and I actually find that it's inexcusable that they've had this data for a very long time to yesterday day before again they've said fast tag if you refuse to have a fast tag then you're going to be penalized I mean you shouldn't have it in a little while they might actually I don't know what they may do with it but right now they've said if you don't have it you'll have to pay twice the amount now a fast tag is now something embedded in the car the registration of your car will be easily identifiable because the department is selling that data to you have this data wherever you travel at what speed you travel with cities you go to how often you go all of that being tracked and the libertarians in the corporate world don't seem to have any problem with it they're pushing for it in fact it comes from their reports so it's a you know it's a it's a time when I think the lessons from eminent domain and the idea that the state owns first question is who is the state does the state own us really and every time to say okay the snide one was this that they went to court and said no privacy okay people of this country don't have a right to privacy the UID AI was represented the government was represented I mean the central government you had the finance department everybody was represented to say there is no right to privacy then the court gives a resounding judgment where nine of them say there is no question it's not just a right it's not just a fundamental right it is an inherent right it is an innate right all other rights depend upon it there's no question of taking away this time the next thing you hear is that the proponents of the UID AI are saying excellent judgment this is exactly what we wanted so if that is exactly what you wanted why is every policy that is coming after that I mean even if it is face saving I mean they'd gone to court and said we don't believe people have this right the truth is that when they went to court and said that it was an open statement to all of us that these projects cannot survive privacy the test of privacy they will lose out so I'll just stop with saying this there is a whole lot more I don't know I mean it's like and our past structured part unstructured kind of thing but I'll just stop with saying this that see today we are seeing a relationship between the state and business interest which is you know we've gone through many phases of this where there's collaboration of various kinds today we are actually seeing them working together and refusing to acknowledge rights in pd and that is these are strange times this is not something that you know that we can see as something that will pass if this is not addressed today and if we don't understand what it is and if we don't take the history of other movements that have had to struggle for so long to get where they've where they've got whether it's you know because of land it was difficult to do that with water otherwise water was getting privatized rivers were getting privatized and they said this doesn't belong with you so that party has already happened so we need to learn from the history of various ways in which the state and state and business interest has been construed over a period of time or else we are going to find ourselves waiting for another hundred years to recognize a historic injustice which i think is a bad thing