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By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 7:46:04 pm

India’s Digital Footprint Is No Longer a Choice

India’s digital economy has made personal data unavoidable. The harder task is ensuring that citizens retain meaningful control over the trails they leave behind. In August this year, the Unified Payments Interface processed about 24.5 billion transactions worth nearly Rs. 29.8 lakh crore, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India. Aadhaar’s authentication system recorded more than 17,759 crore transactions in FY2025-26, according to UIDAI’s dashboard. Behind these...

India’s Digital Footprint Is No Longer a Choice

India’s digital economy has made personal data unavoidable. The harder task is ensuring that citizens retain meaningful control over the trails they leave behind. In August this year, the Unified Payments Interface processed about 24.5 billion transactions worth nearly Rs. 29.8 lakh crore, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India. Aadhaar’s authentication system recorded more than 17,759 crore transactions in FY2025-26, according to UIDAI’s dashboard. Behind these numbers sits a question Indian policy has yet to answer clearly: what happens to the data these systems generate, and who controls it? The most pressing privacy question in India today is not what people choose to post online. It is what they are required to leave behind to take part in everyday life. A UPI payment leaves a transaction trail. A loan application generates financial records. A food-delivery order records your address and buying habits. A cab ride shows where you work and when you travel. A social-media post adds something more personal: what you think, like, fear or believe. Individually, these fragments look harmless. Together, they can describe a remarkably detailed version of a person’s life. Orwellian Society This is not digital technology invading a society that was once offline. It is a society in which digital systems have become part of ordinary economic life. For a software professional, deleting social media may be an inconvenience. For a domestic worker paid through a bank account, a student applying for a scholarship or a pensioner completing an identity check, opting out is not a workable choice. Consider an ordinary Saturday. You check the weather, search for a medicine, order groceries, pay through UPI, book a cab and make an online purchase. No single action tells a complete story. Together, they reveal your location, spending patterns, household composition, health concerns and daily routine. Artificial intelligence changes what this data means, because machine systems are increasingly good at connecting fragments that once sat in separate databases. The concern is not that an AI system knows what you searched for once. It is that automated systems can identify patterns across millions of ordinary interactions that, taken individually, meant little. The problem is also one of asymmetry. The individual usually sees only the service being offered; the organisation sees the accumulated information behind it. A single transaction may be trivial, but millions of such transactions can become commercially or administratively valuable when linked and analysed. That makes data different from many other commodities. Once information has been copied, combined or used to build a profile, the original individual may have little visibility into its subsequent journey. The question is therefore not simply who collected the data, but who can combine it, infer from it and act upon those inferences. The public debate on AI scraping is often too simple. Not every online interaction is pulled into an AI model, and not every company holds every piece of a person’s digital life. Collection depends on the platform, its policies, its technical architecture and the applicable law. But the gap is real: the capacity to analyse vast volumes of information is growing faster than most people’s understanding of where their information goes. A PwC India survey found that 56 percent of consumers did not know their rights over personal data, while 70 percent said privacy policies were difficult to understand. When a person does not understand what they are agreeing to, consent risks becoming a formality rather than a genuine choice. There is also a distinction between privacy and secrecy. A person may have nothing embarrassing to hide and still reasonably object to a detailed record of their movements, purchases and associations being assembled without meaningful control. Privacy is less about having something to conceal than about retaining a degree of agency over one’s own life. A Right on Paper The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 gives individuals rights to correct and erase personal data, subject to the conditions and exceptions set out in the law. The government notified the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules in November 2025, with provisions coming into force in phases. On paper, this changes the relationship between citizens and the organisations that hold their data. In practice, most people do not think in terms of “Data Principal” or “Data Fiduciary” when an app asks for access to their information. They think about whether the app will still work if they say no. That is the test that decides whether a data-protection law functions on the ground. A small retailer selling online may not fully understand the compliance requirements. An elderly customer faces a long privacy notice before completing a routine transaction. A young user accepts an app’s terms because refusing means losing access to a service that friends or employers already use. A right that exists on paper does not guarantee a person’s ability to exercise it. The ability to protect personal data is not distributed evenly. A high-income professional can pay for privacy-focused software, encrypted communication and legal advice. Someone on a smaller income uses whichever free application is available. The same divide applies to time. A person who understands technology can adjust permissions and request deletion. A person working two jobs may accept an app’s terms because reading a 30-page privacy notice at 11 p.m. is hardly realistic. This produces an uneven outcome. The people with the strongest ability to protect their data are often the same people with the clearest sense of what is being collected. Those with fewer resources tend to generate more data while having less power to question how it is used. This is why treating “going offline” as the solution has limited use in India. Cash does not cover every digital transaction. A basic phone does not replace every digital service. Deleting a social-media account does not erase bank or government records. Refusing every digital platform carries its own economic cost, particularly for people who depend on digital payments for income. The realistic goal is not disappearance. It is control. India’s digital economy should not be measured only by payment volumes or platform reach. It should also be measured by whether people understand the exchange taking place underneath that convenience. Regulators should track whether a person can find out what a service holds about them, correct inaccurate information, delete data that is no longer necessary and withdraw consent without clicking through several layers of settings. The sharper test is what happens when data collected for one purpose becomes useful for another. Rising Stakes The stakes will rise as India’s digital infrastructure becomes more deeply embedded in public services, finance and commerce. The country has built impressive systems for moving money and verifying identity; the next challenge is to build equally credible systems for limiting what can be inferred from the information those systems generate. The next phase of India’s privacy debate should move past the idea of digital disappearance, because most people have no practical way to leave the systems through which they earn, pay, borrow, travel, study and access public services. The more useful task is making those systems answerable to the people whose lives they record. The measure of digital freedom is not whether a citizen leaves no trace. It is whether they have a say over where that trace leads. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Bold, Successful, and Never Dull

Writer: Waleed Hussain
Waleed Hussain
Aug 9
3 min read

Ajit Agarkar took charge as chairman of the BCCI’s senior men’s selection committee in mid-2023, stepping into one of Indian cricket’s most thankless jobs. Nearly three years later, his record is a study in contrasts: glittering white-ball success on one side, grinding Test struggles and recurring controversies on the other. Any honest assessment must hold both in view.


The results in limited-overs cricket under Agarkar’s watch have been exceptional. India reached four ICC tournament finals between late 2023 and early 2026 and won three of them — the 2024 T20 World Cup, the 2025 Champions Trophy, and the 2026 T20 World Cup. The 2023 ODI World Cup final appearance, though a defeat, completed a period of sustained excellence rarely seen in Indian cricket’s recent history. That consistency of performance is the strongest argument in Agarkar’s favour. Selectors are ultimately judged by the teams they send out, and the white-ball sides he helped shape delivered.


Several of his decisions proved decisive. Appointing Suryakumar Yadav as full-time T20 captain ahead of the more obvious candidate, Hardik Pandya, was widely criticised at the time. Agarkar’s panel prioritised availability and form over reputation. The subsequent success of that call vindicated the choice. Equally bold was the decision to leave Shubman Gill out of the 2026 T20 World Cup squad despite his stature as Test and ODI captain, and to bring back Ishan Kishan on the strength of domestic form. These were not popular moves. They required Agarkar to push back against the team management and public sentiment. That he was prepared to do so, and that the results largely justified the risk, speaks to a willingness to take responsibility.


Defining Feature

The management of the generational transition in Test cricket was another defining feature. Overseeing the exits of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma from the longest format after the 2024-25 Border-Gavaskar Trophy series loss was never going to be painless. Agarkar’s committee also gradually moved past Mohammed Shami. These calls were necessary if Indian cricket was to avoid clinging to fading greatness. The fact that the panel was prepared to make them, rather than postpone the inevitable, deserves credit.


Yet the same period has exposed clear shortcomings. India’s Test performances under Agarkar have been deeply disappointing. A 3-0 home whitewash by New Zealand, further home struggles against South Africa, and a 3-1 defeat in Australia ended a long period of dominance. Home conditions that once guaranteed results suddenly looked unmanageable. Critics fairly asked whether the selection committee had prepared adequately for the post-Kohli-Rohit era or simply hoped young players would step up without sufficient scaffolding.


Player management has also been uneven. The repeated experiments with Shubman Gill in T20 cricket — elevating him, making him vice-captain, then dropping him — created unnecessary disruption. Promising talents such as Yashasvi Jaiswal never quite secured a settled place in the white-ball setup. The treatment of players like Hardik Pandya, Shreyas Iyer, and Mohammed Shami at various points fuelled accusations of inconsistency and, in some cases, personal bias. Agarkar’s relative absence from domestic matches drew further criticism; a chief selector who spends more time travelling with the national team than watching Ranji Trophy games inevitably invites questions about the depth of his knowledge base.


Poor Timing

Controversies have followed him throughout. The decision to replace Rohit Sharma as ODI captain not long after the Champions Trophy win was seen by many as premature and poorly timed. The Asia Cup squad selections that left out established names triggered public uproar. More recently, the handling of Rohit Sharma’s future during the England tour in 2026 has placed Agarkar’s own position under scrutiny, with reports suggesting the BCCI is now considering alternatives such as VVS Laxman when his current term ends.


What emerges is a picture of a selector who has been unusually willing to make unpopular decisions and unusually quick to correct course when those decisions misfired. The Gill experiment is the clearest example: once it became clear the move had not worked, the panel reversed it without prolonged hesitation. That capacity for course-correction is rare and valuable.


Agarkar’s tenure will ultimately be remembered for the silverware and for the courage required to force a transition that many preferred to delay. The Test record and the occasional sense of randomness in individual selections will remain legitimate black marks. In the unforgiving business of Indian cricket selection, few leave with an unblemished ledger. Agarkar’s is mixed but, on balance, tilted toward achievement. The trophies are real. The hard calls were largely necessary. Whether that is enough for another extension is for the BCCI to decide. The results, however, already form a substantial part of the argument.


(The writer is a senior journalist based in Mumbai.)

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