 Hello, and welcome to NewsClick. Last month, global retail giant Walmart picked up a 77% stake in India's largest e-commerce company Flipkarts. Even as the deal is under consideration with the Competition Commission of India, a variety of groups have expressed their objections to the deal. To talk about some of these objections, we have with us Paraminder Jeet Singh from IT for Change. Hello, Paraminder. Paraminder, so we have seen the media discussing the deal, the various aspects of the deal and a lot of these discussions have been around the e-commerce sector and its implications for the sector and its future. But let's slightly shift the debate and go into the question of data itself, which hasn't been examined much. So in the context of the larger discussions around Facebook and the politics of data itself and even data being the new oil, how would you see this deal and its implications? Yeah, I think this deal, most players are still looking at it from the angle of that old Walmart thing, which was a post, the Walmart entry was a post by almost all political parties and BGP was one of the big opposers. And people are still talking of it as a similar thing, while it is similar because e-Walmart and that's how I see it, takeover of Flipkart by Walmart is a kind of e-Walmart for me is many more times powerful than an offline Walmart. People try to push it as if it's a very small market because very few people buy online, but today online and offline retails are being integrated. And as the owner of Alibaba, Jack Ma says, e-commerce is actually a misnomer. The term they use now is new retail, which is integration of offline and online. And this integration takes place through what you raised, the vital point data. Now it is data which is at the center of both the online strategy and offline strategy. What happens is that e-commerce companies get to control such immense amount of data about not only consumption, which is very important, but production, logistics, they know everything who needs it, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it, when it should be moved, the complete control of the data of the whole system. And it is through this data, they come to control the whole system. Now I quickly give you an example. The way Facebook and Google today control all parts of our lives. Our information access, our communication, even media largely, is greatly controlled by these companies. They control it because they have data about these systems. And these are the information and communication surface. Now if you put the same kind of control over the physical economy, you start getting the picture. What e-commerce companies are. And that's why we oppose Walmart and also oppose Amazon. And if these two companies become a duopoly in the e-commerce sector, it is actually for us a duopoly over the whole economy. And also you also referred to how this was a huge missed opportunity for India in terms of how earlier letting in Amazon and now this deal itself represents a big loss for the Indian business sector also. So could you talk a bit more about that? I think, first of all, I could not understand what do we really gain with letting Walmart in that other countries who are unfortunately do not have the kind of ICTs which are required, do not have the management expertise that's required to what we call as digitally industrialized and they often have to rely on outside companies. But in India, we already had homegrown companies doing very well. Flipkart has come to this point on its own. It's doing well. We have an Indian company where the data stays in inside India. When they become powerful, you can regulate an Indian company. Why do you want to hand it over to outsiders? Because for a Walmart, which becomes a global company, has global data, becomes artificial intelligence powered, time comes, it becomes impossible to regulate them. So the missed opportunity is that we should have allowed our homegrown digital companies to grow. Doing rather well is better than most developing countries. Of course, China is an exception and we should protect them and our digital platforms should be homegrown and this protection is needed in the same way as in early industrialization period. We would protect our own industries and once they become strong and powerful, then we can slowly open them up. Which has been China's strategy also. Yes. A clear example, the only country which has succeeded in digital industrialization other than the US is China. EU is in a big problem and people talk about EU already as a digital colony of the US. NASPR's head was in India a few months back and he said, don't go the EU way because EU is a digital colony and NASPR is the biggest shareholder in Tencent, which is bigger than Alibaba. So NASPR's head would know what he's talking about. So China is the only example other than the US, which was the first mover, which has been able to develop a digital sector and the proof is clear in the pudding that you protect your digital companies, they grow big and then you can even go out of your country. And India and that is an important point. India has all the ICT competence, all the management competence. Indians are running many Silicon Valley companies. So we have everything it takes to develop our own platform such as the most foolish to let our big platforms to be sold. So this digital colonialism as you mentioned, so could you talk a bit more on the implications of how it actually might move in from the online sector to the so-called non-online market? Yes. It's a problematic distinction, but none the less. No, it is important because it starts from the data side and the controls go to the offline world. And people still call it a marketplace. It's not a marketplace. Platform is a new kind of animal which controls everything from production to logistics to even primary activity like agriculture and farming. Data gives power to platforms to predict what needs to be manufactured in what quantities. The manufacturer would soon get a design and that person has simply to do 3D printing and produce exactly the number of goods which are already been predicted and the logistics would move as per the platform's directions. Everybody's moving as per the directions of the platform because platform is digitally intelligent from the data it has gathered. It acts like a brain of the whole system. The farmer is already told how much production is expected, how much rain is expected, how is your soil quality, what kind of inputs you should make, what kind of things you can produce when I would pick it up. So it becomes an animal which controls the whole economy through the digital intelligence which acts like a brain, as I said. And every player becomes like a worker. You lose your economic independence. Like a worker who's told in the morning you have to do these things and five o'clock you can go off. So everybody, a trader, a manufacturer, a primary producer becomes like a worker who's exactly told what has to be done and what produces to be produced and how it will be collected. And therefore when you lose your economic independence, you are given sustenance amount of returns. And of course there are no worker benefits in a traditional sense. And therefore platform is neither a marketplace nor a firm. It's a completely new kind of an institution. And since it's a new institution, it requires new kind of regulations which government of India has not even started thinking about. But at least as long as the companies are Indian, we can when the time comes regulate them. But if we get dependent as we are on Facebook and Google, on global e-commerce companies who are very strong and I keep on saying, add the artificial intelligence angle to it which will become very forceful in the next decade or so, you are not able to regulate them. And therefore you lose all your economic independence right to the primary producer and also political independence because you don't have policy independence. And outsiders control your economy and with it also your politics and culture. So one of the key arguments being presently in favor of the deal is that ultimately it's to the benefit of the consumer. So how are the various movements and organizations opposing this trying to counter this argument? See, we all know it's the age old truth that if somebody holds economic power which is highly concentrated and there is no possibility of regulation over that economic power, it will amass benefits for itself and it will minimize the benefits which are given to others whether it is a producer or a consumer because economic concentration of power is what counts. And especially when that concentration cannot be counted by policy and I have been giving the scenario, then they become so powerful and they're global that policy is not able to counter them. Therefore the consumers may be getting discounts now. And most of these discounts are basically because they are accumulating data capital in return. That's the invisible commodity which is going from you to the company which you are not noticing. And then you get a discount with Uber or with Amazon and said, oh, I got something. No, but your data has been transferred and this data is a vehicle of control over you over the next many decades. And that control means economic exploitation and the return on the other side. So what you see as discounts is the money paid for the data which has been collected. And that's completely invisible. So developing countries should start recognizing data as a valuable commodity, start accounting for the value which gets transferred when data is collected. And once you start looking in data and digital intelligence as a valuable quantity, you would know why it should be owned locally. Thank you, Parmel. Thank you so much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsLeak.