Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take steps to end increasing "data colonisation" and said Indians should own and control their own data.

"Data is the new oil (in the new world order). And data is the new wealth. India's data must be controlled and owned by Indian people - and not by corporates, especially global corporations," Ambani said at the 9th Vibrant Gujarat Summit.

Paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi in the year of his 150th birth anniversary, Ambani drew parallels to Gandhi's movement against political colonisation and said, "today, we have to collectively launch a new movement against data colonisation."

"For India to succeed in this data-driven revolution, we will have to migrate the control and ownership of Indian data back to India - in other words, Indian wealth back to every Indian," he said.

This is the second time within a month that Ambani has backed Indian authorities' efforts to get companies to store data locally.

The government wants companies doing business in India to store all customer data locally. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in April 2018 ordered companies to store the "the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them... In a system only in India" so as to ensure "unfettered supervisory access" for "better monitoring".

The government is considering a draft data security law that requires data centres for all companies be physically located within India. Also under consideration is an e-commerce policy that requires the storage of customer data in the country.

The draft data privacy bill recommends restrictions on the transfer and storage of information by global giants from Facebook to Google.

Ambani, who had himself supercharged internet adoption by helping crash data prices with the launch of his telecom venture Jio in 2016, had last month in Mumbai stated that "data colonisation is as bad as the previous forms of colonisation."

Without giving timelines, he said Jio and Reliance Retail, which has over 9,000 stores across 6,500-plus towns in the country, will launch "a unique new commerce platform to empower and enrich our 12 lakh small retailers and shopkeepers in Gujarat - which are part of over 3 crore community in India."

Ambani had previously spoken of leveraging the Jio network for launching some sort of an e-commerce venture.

With inputs from PTI.

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First Published:Jan 18, 2019 3:03 PM IST