The government has confirmed to announce the National Telecom Policy 2018 tomorrow, under which it's going to bring vision on Indian telecom sector until 2022. In the NTP 2018, the government may come up with provisions on data independence and might ask all the companies hosting data of India to set up the servers in the country by 2022. This news was reported by Press Trust of India. "The NTP is being framed with vision to give access of all services to people at click of a button. For most of the things like education, government services and even health people should not need to visit physically. There will be a lot of data generated for all this. Hence, NTP is likely to propose setting up of all servers hosting data of Indian citizens and entities to be kept in local servers by 2022," sources aware of the matter said to PTI.
This essentially means that the government will limit the telcos and other companies to keep the data of Indian citizens such as messages, emails etc. within the boundaries of the country unless it's addressed to the people stating overseas. Currently, most of the companies including social media, email firms are using data servers located abroad, even for the emails or messages sent within the national boundary.
"Draft (NTP) will have provision around data sovereignty and stringent framework for data protection in the telecom networks. All ministries are working on their digital program as directed by the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi). Telecom has to be a key enabler of all these processes, and data security is extremely important to support transformation to digital infrastructure," the report further added.
In recent times, there have been a lot of allegations of misuse of servers located abroad for the surveillance by countries and companies where they are located. This will make the job of Indian consumers a lot easier. It is also reported by PTI that in future, people may apply for passport sitting at their home.
"The revenue department of states are talking about latitude-longitude based identification of houses and lands. When PM talks about digital India, the intent is to give access all permissions, documentation to people without them having to visit offices physically. The NTP will come up with provisions to provide high-speed broadband access for all in the country. It will promote massive optical fibre roll-out in the country along with the use of satellites in remote areas," the person further added.
"Indians should and will have right to own their data. Big Data analytics will be done within the national boundary and put to use for Indians. The NTP is likely to propose measures to enable this," he stated.
Aruna Sundararajan, the Telecom Secretary, a couple of days ago confirmed that the National Telecom Policy 2018 would be out on May 1, seeking comments from the public and stakeholders.
