Airtel seeks sovereign stack to control Indians' data processed overseas

Bharti Airtel has questioned fragmented approach in rules at present to allow data processing of Indians overseas and has pushed for control on local data using sovereign cloud, a senior company official has said.

Speaking at Global Fintech Fest 2026, Bharti Airtel, Group CRO and Director -- Corporate Affairs, Rahul Vatts -- said it is not correct to equate local data residency with data sovereignty but it is about controlling the data with a sovereign technology stack.

He said the government came up with the first circular on this, which is actually quite pathbreaking "and the government has had very detailed discussions over the last 30-45 days as to what we should be really looking at".

He said while the government remains proactive, two areas that should always be important for us to keep -- one is to have a clear discussion on where the control plane is and the manner in which it will be managed.

"The second part is that we need to get away from this fragmented policy approach. For example, the government today says that critical government data sets should be under sovereign ground. But why not for the energy data, health record, the identities of people? I think this policy approach has to be consistent so that we cover the entire universe of what is critical to us," he said.

Vatts said as sectoral regulators begin issuing their own enabling guidelines, the question for critical workloads is no longer just about the selection of any cloud, but a careful evaluation of which cloud architecture guarantees end-to-end control under Indian law.

"Today your data is susceptible to anything. Your identity, your health record, your financial reports are all critical datasets. Why should any other country have access to that data? The universe has to be that we have to have the laws which control the data which we have and we also have a control plane which we are able to manage in terms of sovereignty," he said.

Airtel is in the process of building a couple of 100-megawatt data centres over the next couple of years and is betting big on demand for sovereign cloud infrastructure required for strategic reason in the country.

Vatts said India is already generating the largest data per consumer.

"We are already hitting around 38-40 GB per month per customer. And if a lot of predictions now take us towards 7075 GB per customer in next 3-4 years. So you are already generating humongous amount of data," he said.

Vatts said increasingly all systems in the country are getting digitised and more than 2.4 billion UPI transactions are happening in the country.

"So you are today generating huge amount of data for yourself. Our financial system is getting robust. Today we need to have a clear control on what's really happening around in our own universe. If you look at the world, the world is also trying to look at it differently. If you go to Germany, you go to France, increasingly now, because of the geopolitical world you are living in, you are having a need to be able to control your data," he added.