2025 to be India's year in chips

With India set to produce its first chip by August, 2025 will be the country's year in semiconductors, Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of electronics and information technology, railways, and information and broadcasting, said in an interview with Mint.

- Gulveen Aulakh & Subhash Narayan

This will pave the way for India to take the world stage in this field, alongside the US, China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

India's digital personal data protection (DPDP) rules will also come into effect in 2025, by July, the minister said.

The safety of railway operations is a prime concern and will get over ₹1 trillion investment, more than a third of its total annual capex allotment, over the next few years. Installation of the Kavach train protection system on the entire railway network will be completed in six years.

What's been the industry feedback on DPDP rules? Do you foresee challenges in implementation, for instance, for age-gating?

About 95% have been very positive, the balance may seek some tweaks here or there. This is the first time we are attempting a total digital implementation. So, our legal fraternity, our users and the data fiduciaries are more or less aligned. But starting something totally in a digital way of doing things—that has its own sets of challenges, which we would like to address, and we've prepared a lot for it, which is why it took one full year to come out with the rules—they could have been published even eight months back.

Tokenization for age-gating is a first, an experiment that no other country has done. Here, personal information does not get transferred, which is why we did it in Aadhaar two-and-a-half years ago. It was effective and no legal or technical challenges emerged. We'll probably take the lead (in age-gating) and we'll probably be able to evolve a much better solution than what, let's say, Australia or other countries, have attempted. The rules and the act will also evolve with technology.

Would blacklisting or whitelisting countries for data localization be an option? Are we looking at signing data-access treaties with other jurisdictions?