Some of India's major telcos and payment apps want Indian data to be stored in India, according to a document submitted by an industry body to the IT Ministry accessed by Economic Times. What happened? India's proposed data protection law permits personal data to be transferred to countries "trusted" by the government—a move opposed by the likes of Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and PayTM in an Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) submission, reports Economic Times. The industry body largely supports the government's policy with the exception of these members for now. Why it matters? Past versions of India's data protection law imposed explicit data localisation provisions. For example, sensitive personal data could be transferred abroad but had to be stored in India. The latest version doesn't explicitly say anything of this sort—but industry experts have repeatedly argued that the "whitelisting" approach could implicitly mean the government is batting for data localisation by default. Translation: personal data can only be transferred to some trusted countries, while the remaining troves will have to be stored in India because they can't go anywhere else. If that's the case, then Jio, Airtel, and PayTM's stance is puzzling—why push for data localisation, when it could be the status quo anyway? What's the IAMAI's larger stance? The answer to the question above might be found in the IAMAI's larger feedback on the proposed law's stance on cross border data flows. The industry body recommends inversing the proposed process—by loosely blacklisting countries instead. That means that you essentially allow cross-border personal data…
