Piyush Goel met Industry Stakeholders on E-Commerce & Data Localization

New Delhi: Union Minister of Commerce and Industry & Railways, Piyush Goyal held a meeting with Industry stakeholders on e-Commerce and data localization in New Delhi on Monday. The minister widely discussed the issues such as opportunities for India in the growing digital economy, value addition in Indian GDP due to advent of e-commerce, understanding data flows from four aspects – privacy, security, safety and free choice, ownership and sharing of data, gains and costs of cross border flow of data and means to monitor use of data.

Strength and Weakness of e-Commerce discussed

Issues like strengths and weaknesses of Indian companies who may benefit from e-commerce, threats from large foreign competition, level playing field and impact of anti-competitive practices such as predatory pricing and other discriminatory practices came up for discussion during Commerce Minister's meeting with Indian e-Commerce companies. Gains and costs of cross border flow of data, ownership and sharing of data and efficiency gains and losses on utilizing Indian data servers, emails, clouds were deliberated upon too during the meet.

Challenges of IT Industry

Anticipated increase in costs and efficiency losses due to data localization, timeline to create a data infrastructure to comply with data localisation norms and developing Indian data servers, clouds, emails: Scope, coverage, advantages, disadvantages, costs and gains were some of the issues which figured during Goyal's meeting with Indian IT companies.

The meeting was attended by Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, SomParkash, Secretary, DPIIT, Secretary, Department of Commerce, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Deputy Governor ofRBI, B.P. Kanungo, and senior officers from Ministry of External Affairs, Department of Commerce & DPIIT along with the representatives of e-Commerce and IT companies.