New Delhi: With the today’s announcement by the government clearly stating that it is not ready to relax Reserve Bank of India’s October 15 deadline for the condition of data localization, the matter has become tough for all the global digital payment service providers who wanted more time to follow the guidelines.
According to the RBI guidelines, all kind of digital payment firms like Google Pay, WhatsApp and many others musts store all the business data in a local server within the Indian territory. The set deadline to comply with those norms ended today.
WhatsApp said in a statement that in India, about a million people were testing the payments feature in the app to send money to each other in a simple and secure way.
“In response to India’s payments data circular, we’ve built a system that stores payments-related data locally in India,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
The spokesperson did not clarify whether the Facebook-owned company has followed the procedure sought by the government and submitted a compliance report sought by the RBI. Having more than 200 million users, India is considered to be the largest market for WhatsApp.
According to the reports, Google Pay has asked for some more time over the issue from the government. Back in September, Google Chief Executive Sunder Pichai wrote to the Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, that the policy of advocating free flow of data across borders needs to be encouraged, as this will help global companies to take part in the growth of India’s digital economy.
Mr Pichai said the free flow of data across borders would also greatly help in benefiting Indian start-ups looking to expand globally. “Free flow of data across borders — with a focus on user privacy and security — will encourage start-ups to innovate and expand globally and encourage global companies to contribute to India’s digital economy,” Mr Pichai wrote.
“The Google team in India will be in touch with your office to follow up on some of the specific topics we discussed during our meeting,” said Mr Pichai, thanking Mr.Prasad for his visit in the month of August to Google’s Mountain View campus in the US.
But on Monday, according to the sources, it became clear that the government was not interested in favouring of extending the deadline set by RBI for data localization plan.
As per the digital payment provider Paytm, all the related data of all payments of Indian users is required to be processed and stored within the territory borders of the country and must not be allowed to be taken out of the country, not even for the purpose of processing. “We have complied with this mandate since day one and have welcomed this initiative right from the beginning,” a Paytm spokesperson said.
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