On June 25, the day before US Secretary of State landed in New Delhi, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal met representatives of Walmart and a dozen other e-commerce companies.

The very next day Goyal himself announced that India had dropped its insistence on ‘Data Localisation’. Curiously, on the same day the Reserve Bank of India reiterated what it had laid down last year in April, 2018. “The entire payment data shall be stored in systems located only in India”.

Even more curiously, the RBI statement added, “there was no bar on processing of the data abroad, but the end data should only be stored in India”!

What kind of data protection is this?

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