India leading digital transformation race: Microsoft's Anant Maheshwari

Bengaluru: Microsoft said that the lack of clarity in India over its personal data protection policy is making people “slow down” decision making and was hopeful that a policy in place would clear the confusion soon.

India’s draft Personal Data Protection Bill recommends critical personal data that will be defined by the government, to be stored and processed in the country. It also has defined personal data to be stored locally and copy-taken outside the country. Data of businesses or contracts can be taken and processed outside India, subject to prior approvals.

The Reserve Bank of India has already mandated payments companies and banks to store and process user data locally.


Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India said the sweeping data privacy policy in Europe, “GDPR, has resulted in more digital transformation” and created room for development of artificial intelligence-based tools.

He believes having India’s own data localisation policy, which advocates for keeping a mirrored copy of critical data locally, would speed up decision making and set a framework for the companies such as Microsoft to define the right use of data.

“I think having this clarity is more important than not having it because it allows people to think within a framework that is clearly defined. Today with the lack of a framework everybody is trying to imagine what it might be and that causes people to slow down some decisions because they don’t have clarity,” Maheshwari told ET. “I actually would say this is a good thing that we will get clarity hopefully soon”.

The draft policy, which was initially planned to be placed in the Parliament during the Winter Session, is now scheduled in June, after the new government takes charge, ET reported on January 4. The Microsoft India president said data policies in other markets have resulted in digital transformation opportunities across organisations.

“It is definitely needed across the world and it is not uncommon to see this happen. GDPR has already happened in Europe. That has caused even more digital transformation, even more cloud, AI to take off in the European Union,” he said.