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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.)

Lingua Pragmatica

Correspondent
Mar 19, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Mar 20, 2025

As Southern leaders like M.K. Stalin rage against Hindi, Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu offers a model of pragmatism over parochialism.

Chandrababu Naidu
Andhra Pradesh

Amid the cacophony of opposition in southern states to Hindi, Andhra Pradesh CM N. Chandrababu Naidu has taken a markedly pragmatic stance by remarking recently in the state Assembly that there was no harm in learning other languages. Hindi, Naidu noted, was useful for communication across India, particularly in political and commercial hubs like Delhi. His remarks, though avoiding explicit mention of the NEP, were widely seen as an endorsement of multilingualism and a rebuke to the linguistic chauvinism that has gripped parts of the South.


Few issues in India stir political passions quite like language. It is not merely a means of communication but a marker of identity, a relic of colonial resistance, and a source of political mobilization. In the southern states, where anti-Hindi sentiment has long been entrenched, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and its three-language formula have reignited old tensions. No state embodies this defiance more than Tamil Nadu, where the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) led by M.K. Stalin has framed the policy as an assault on its linguistic autonomy.


Naidu’s words, welcomed by his ally and Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan, mark a sharp contrast with the DMK’s position. Tamil Nadu’s hostility towards Hindi dates back to the 1930s, when C. Rajagopalachari’s attempt to introduce it in schools met with fierce resistance. The anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s cemented the DMK’s ideological stance, with its first Chief Minister, C.N. Annadurai, famously warning that Hindi imposition could push Tamil Nadu towards secession.


The question, however, is whether this rigid opposition serves Tamil Nadu’s interests. While Stalin, with an eye to the upcoming Tamil Nadu Assembly polls, has been relentlessly portraying Hindi as a threat to his state’s regional identity, Naidu, a partner of the BJP-led Centre, is framing it as a tool for economic mobility. His argument is not that Hindi should replace Telugu or English but that it offers a competitive advantage.


The economic case for multilingualism is compelling. Indians who speak multiple languages tend to have better job prospects, higher earnings and greater geographic mobility. Andhra Pradesh’s Telugu-speaking diaspora is a case in point. Telugus make up a significant proportion of Indian-origin professionals in the United States, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia as Naidu pointed out, hinting that this success story was built not on linguistic rigidity but on adaptability.


In a country where inter-state migration is rising and where Hindi remains the most widely spoken language, refusing to learn it amounts to self-imposed isolation. Tamil Nadu’s approach, by contrast, risks limiting its youth. The DMK government has refused to implement the three-language policy, keeping schools strictly bilingual with Tamil and English. Its justification that Hindi is not necessary for global success could be true in a narrow sense but ignores the domestic context. If Tamil filmmakers can dub their movies into Hindi to expand their audience, why should Tamil students be denied access to the language that could open more doors for them within India?


The DMK has accused successive central governments, particularly under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of pushing Hindi at the expense of regional languages. Yet, rejecting Hindi outright is an overcorrection. The reality is that Hindi is an important language in India’s economic and political landscape. Naidu’s position, one of accommodation rather than confrontation, offers a middle ground that other Southern leaders would do well to consider.


Some states already recognize this. Karnataka, despite its own history of linguistic pride, has allowed Hindi to be taught as an optional language. Kerala, whose migrants work in Hindi-speaking regions and the Gulf, has been less hostile to Hindi education. Naidu’s model, balancing regional identity with practical necessity, offers a way forward. Languages should be embraced, not politicized. Southern leaders would do well to listen to him.

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