By Nikhil Pawha and Aditi Agrawal At the beginning of the meeting with foreign e-commerce companies, Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry, jokingly told representatives, "While you're representing multinational companies, I hope you're all Indian," multiple sources present at the meeting told MediaNama. Then, on a more serious note, he told the representatives, "It's important that country comes first, and you haven't lost your DNA just because you're working for a multinational. Indian interests will be supreme, please understand that." Goyal held meetings with industry representatives on Monday, June 17, at Room 108 in Udyog Bhawan in Delhi, to help evolve India’s position on cross-border flow of data and data localisation ahead of the main G20 summit on 28th and 29th of June. This comes a week after Goyal argued against using free trade to justify the free flow of data, and asserted countries' "sovereign right" over the data of their people at the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Trade and Digital Economy at Tsukuba. The views expressed by bureaucrats and the Minister himself in yesterday's meetings were in the same vein. Multiple sources told MediaNama that the meetings had J.S. Deepak, India's Ambassador at the WTO, participating via video conference. Across the meetings, attendees included representatives of WIPRO, Infosys, MasterCard, IBM, Accenture, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Paypal, Google, Flipkart, Paytm, ShopClues, Snapdeal, Visa, Flipkart, Amazon, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, among others; NASSCOM President Debjani Ghosh attended multiple meetings. Interestingly, sources confirmed to MediaNama that while a Mastercard representative was present at…
