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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.)

Opener turned into six -hitting contest

Writer: Waleed Hussain
Waleed Hussain
Mar 29
4 min read

Mumbai: The IPL 2026 opening match between Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Sunrisers Hyderabad at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium wasn’t a cricket contest. It was a full-scale six-hitting festival, complete with bowlers serving as reluctant ball boys and the leather sphere treating the boundary ropes like an optional suggestion rather than a hard limit.


SRH, batting first after being inserted, scraped together 201 for 9 in their full 20 overs. Stand-in skipper Ishan Kishan led the charge with a fiery 80 off just 38 balls, peppering the stands with 5 sixes and eight fours. It was the kind of knock that screams “I’m the captain now, watch me launch.” Youngster Aniket Verma (or Ankit, depending on the scorecard scribbles) chipped in with a brisk 43 that included another 4 sixes in a desperate late surge. Heinrich Klaasen added his usual muscle, but the early wobble to 49/3 thanks to Jacob Duffy’s fiery 3/22 in the powerplay kept things from spiraling into total absurdity. SRH’s total sixes: a “modest” 12. How refreshingly conservative. One almost expected them to apologize to the bowlers for not clearing the stadium entirely.


Then came RCB’s reply. Chasing 202, the defending champions made it look like a Sunday net session gone gloriously rogue. They polished off the target in a mere 15.4 overs, losing just 4 wickets and winning by 6 wickets with 26 balls to spare. Devdutt Padikkal went ballistic with 61 off 26 balls — a strike rate that would embarrass a missile. He smashed 4 sixes and seven fours, treating SRH spinners like they owed him money. The middle overs turned into a personal highlight reel as he dispatched deliveries into the second and third tiers with contemptuous ease.


Elder Statesman

Virat Kohli, ever the composed elder statesman at 69 not out off 38, casually added 5 sixes of his own. King Kohli didn’t just bat; he conducted a masterclass in timed aggression, finishing the game with a flourish of boundaries that had the Chinnaswamy crowd in absolute delirium. Rajat Patidar and a quick cameo from Tim David ensured there were no unnecessary heart attacks for the home faithful. RCB’s six tally: a cheeky 13. Combined across both innings? A staggering 25 sixes in one high-octane evening.


That’s not T20 cricket anymore. That’s aerial warfare with a red leather projectile. The ball spent more time orbiting the stadium than rolling on the turf. Ground staff probably clocked more kilometers chasing it into the stands than the batsmen ran between wickets. Spectators got an unexpected workout fielding souvenirs, while bowlers stared skyward like astronomers discovering new constellations every over. “Where did that one go?” became the unofficial match commentary.

Collective Hug

The bowlers deserve a collective group hug — or perhaps therapy. Jacob Duffy’s impressive debut haul was the lone bright spot for the attack, but even he must have questioned his career choices every time a length ball disappeared into the night. Short balls? Met with the same disdain. Full tosses? Please, they were practically gift-wrapped invitations to the parking lot. Harshal Patel and the SRH death bowlers leaked runs like a sieve in the final stages, watching six after six sail over their heads while fielders sprinted futilely, arms outstretched in vain hope.


The spinners fared even worse. One over from a hapless SRH tweaker disappeared for multiple maximums, turning what should have been a containing spell into a public humiliation. Krunal Pandya and Harsh Dubey were taken to the cleaners with such regularity that you half-expected the umpires to intervene on humanitarian grounds. Why bowl when the batsmen treat your best deliveries like practice balls for a batting cage?


It’s almost insulting how nonchalantly these sixes were dispatched. No drama, no buildup — just clean, brutal connection followed by polite applause from the crowd and another sprint for the ball boys. Traditionalists mourning the death of “proper” cricket could only clutch their Test whites tighter and mutter about the good old days when a six was an event, not the default setting. At Chinnaswamy, the pitch played like a trampoline on steroids, and the boundaries shrank with every lusty swing.


Group Therapy

By the 15th over of the chase, the match had lost all pretense of competition. It became a group therapy session in power-hitting, where everyone took turns launching the ball into orbit. The six-count on the giant screen must have broken some internal software trying to keep up. If this is the tone for IPL 2026, buckle up, folks. Expect every subsequent game to threaten world records for most maximums, highest strike rates, and most exhausted retrieval staff.


The real MVP? Not Kohli’s classy anchor, not Padikkal’s blitz, not even Duffy’s early breakthroughs. It was the six itself — that glorious, crowd-pleasing projectile that turned a cricket match into prime-time entertainment. Bowlers might as well start their run-ups from the sightscreen next time; at least give the ball a fighting chance.


Bravo to both teams for kicking off the season with such unapologetic carnage. You’ve reminded us why we love this format: raw power, minimal fuss, and maximum entertainment. Just don’t be surprised when future matches come with a mandatory “six insurance” clause for nearby residents. The ropes are trembling, the stands are full, and the bowlers are already booking appointments with sports psychologists. Long live the six. May the aerial assault continue unabated.

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