3 min readPuneFeb 15, 2025 10:11 AM IST
First published on: Feb 14, 2025 at 11:11 PM IST
While India generates 20 percent of all the world’s data, only 3-5 percent of it is used in AI training, as most Indian data is exported and then imported back as AI-driven services sold in dollars by the west. Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO of Ola Cabs likens this situation to a modern-day “East India Company,” where India supplies the raw material (data) but pays a premium for the finished product.
He said this on the first day of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE)’s ‘Artha Chakra’ event which is being held between 14-16 February. Agrawal in his address emphasised that India must develop its own AI ecosystem, given that the country has the largest number of developers and vast amounts of data.
“This is the East India Company Part 2. This time they (West) are not selling us clothes with cotton but they are selling AI with our data..We need to build our own foundational large language model (LLMs) but they need to be built from an ‘Indic lens’ with Indic data, Indic context, Indic knowledge system,” he said while responding to Sanjeev Sanyal, GIPE Chancellor in an interactive session on ‘AI to Mobility’.
Ethics, Open-Source AI, and India’s Approach
Aggarwal also criticised the American AI model, citing its control over the algorithms and training data. “…there’s a big global debate on ethics in AI and the American paradigm here I actually believe is not the right one. The American paradigm is a closed source one where large corporations like Open AI or Google control their algorithms and the training data,” he said. Instead, he advocates for an open-source, community-driven approach, similar to India’s success with UPI and ONDC.
Continuing on India’s approach and Krutrim AI, an AI chatbot and cloud platform developed by Ola, Aggarwal outlined his plans for the future where he mentioned developing India’s cloud infrastructure. He said, “India has the world’s largest amount of data production but we have a total data center capacity of 1 gigawatt. That’s it. I think America has 20 gigawatts already and will be adding 20 gigawatts in the next 2 years,” he said.
“India must invest in data storage and computing power. Krutrim aims to build a hyperscale cloud infrastructure comparable to Amazon Web Services (AWS)…Krutrim’s cloud services are already revenue-generating, with 100,000 developers currently using the Krutrim cloud,” added founder of Ola Electric and founder of Ola Krutrim.
He said this on the first day of Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (GIPE)’s ‘Artha Chakra’ event which is being held between 14-16 February (Express Photo) 
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