Digital Trade Clauses In FTAs And India's Data Industrialization Goals: The Bilateral Way Forward

India's digital trade potential

The incentivization for digitization coupled with pandemic-imposed necessity for adoption of digital tools has led to a manifold increase in quantity of data generation from India. A comprehensive data protection legislation is underway in India which will provide a specialized legal framework for data protection and information privacy. The data protection legislation will have rippling effects for the country, not only domestically but also from the perspective of international trade. Several products and services offered by organizations/entities today require processing of massive amounts of foreign data. At the same time, each activity in the journey of a dataset - like collecting, sharing, processing and protection takes place at various locations around the world, thus being subject to multiple regulations at a time. It is at this juncture, that digital trade clauses in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are increasingly being