Category: Communications

As India’s data privacy law approaches notification, another law that is behind a unique identification number for citizens is being prepped for overhaul to bring it in sync with the new privacy law, a move industry experts said is overdue but needs wider consultation.

Bhuvnesh Kumar, the new chief executive of Uidai (Unique Identification Authority of India), the governing body behind Aadhaar identification, said in a conversation with Mint that discussions “will now begin and take its due course of lawmaking” for a new law to replace the near-decade-old Aadhaar Act, 2016.

“Just an amendment won’t be sufficient—we need a new law to bring Aadhaar up to speed with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), 2023,” Kumar said in his first media interview since taking charge of Uidai on 3 January.

Pointing out that the DPDP Act was not there when the Aadhaar law was made, Kumar, who is also the additional secretary at the ministry of electronics and information technology (Meity), said the current Aadhaar law is quite restrictive and needs to be changed.

“Aadhaar’s usage has been limited by legal restrictions and the requirement for authentication. It is linked to benefits and subsidies, but has far more potential than that,” he added.

To be sure, the current Aadhaar Act was enacted nearly a decade ago and, thus, does not comply with the rules under the DPDP Act. This includes data sharing, data transfer and a host of other regulations.

At stake is not just a legal revamp of Aadhaar, which has over 1.4 billion registered individuals in the government’s database, but also a potential widening of its scope of use.

“In line with the law, we are also expanding the scope of usage of Aadhaar at businesses, while minimizing the risk of the identity document being misused by entities,” Kumar added.

Uidai is also making a new Aadhaar app that eases on-the-move verification of an individual’s identity without the need for an active internet connection.

“It’s not just for benefits—Aadhaar’s QR-scan feature, for instance, can be used to verify the authenticity of a person in line with government laws by a business without third parties getting involved,” said Kumar.

He added that other areas where Aadhaar can be integrated in line with the new law and Aadhaar app include verifying parental consent on social media platforms as mandated by the DPDP Act’s soon-to-be-notified rules, if technology platforms so desire.

For perspective, technology platforms can decide how they want to comply with verifiable parental consent for underage users of online platforms, and Aadhaar is not mandatory for it. For example, companies can accept a voluntary age disclosure form to onboard underage users.

Security of the crucial document is on the radar as well. “Uidai is also setting up a data sharing instrument that businesses can buy from us. This will help businesses automate identity verification without human intervention or people taking photos of your document that can later be misused,” Kumar said.

On 9 April, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw mentioned the need for “a new law” for Aadhaar for the first time—calling for India’s most-issued government identification document to be “harmonized vis-à-vis the DPDP Act keeping human interest at the centre”.

Read this | DPDP draft rules raise concerns on parental consent, national security checks

The 12-digit identification document is the most widely used government identity today, for which Uidai attracts 75,000 applications per day for new Aadhaar issuance. As per Kumar, 99.5% of adults in India are already under Aadhaar’s ambit, covering 1.41 billion entries in the Aadhaar database.

Timely move
Policy consultants and stakeholders believe the move is necessary, but certain safeguards need to be considered.

Isha Suri, research lead for technology policy and data privacy at think-tank, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), sought an extensive public consultation process to understand gaps that a new Aadhaar law should address. On his part, Kumar said public consultation will be a part of the lawmaking process, which will “take its due course and time”.

Suri added, “Instead of retrospectively looking at which areas of the law would need to be filled in as technology and private sector’s tech adoption evolves, a robust consultation with civil society and private entities alike can help frame a law that better addresses user privacy and the efficacy of Aadhaar.”

The new Aadhaar Act will look to make Aadhaar data verification more seamless through new sharing mechanisms, reduce the number of people in the middle with access to a person’s own data, and more.

Kumar, a career bureaucrat who joined public services with the 1995 Uttar Pradesh cadre, is keen to showcase Aadhaar as a seamless identification document that can help authenticate identity and transaction, while minimizing the number of hands through which data transfers take place.

“The only time we share data with entities is in requests for e-know your customer (KYC). Aadhaar is the only document that can be verified through a mobile phone itself—without needing internet connectivity or a specialized device. This increases the scope of usage of the document,” Kumar said, adding that all of this is expected to widen Aadhaar’s scope in fields such as hospitality, financial services, etc.

At stake is also a question around minimizing the amount of data shared with entities and reducing the number of intermediaries in the data sharing process.

Underlining that data storage and retention, as defined by the DPDP Act, is “principle-based”, Kumar said that for Aadhaar, any individual challenging the tenure of data retention will have the power to first request the business holding the data. In case of no resolution, the Data Protection Board—an empowered entity under India’s privacy law—can intervene and rule on a per-case basis.

However, identity scammers have doubled down on attempts to breach data security by generating Aadhaar identification lookalikes through artificial intelligence platforms, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Such identification, privacy advocates have underlined, pose a key challenge to information sanctity when presented to businesses.

Kumar underlined that it is “impossible” to generate an Aadhaar from any AI engine. “What it is generating is a look-alike image of something, which is replicated,” he said, adding that this won’t work as there is no supporting biometric. Livemint

A zero-for-zero tariff strategy under the proposed bilateral trade agreement between India and the US is unlikely, as the two countries are at different levels of economic development, official sources said.

Certain trade experts have suggested that India can propose a zero-for-zero tariff strategy to the US for addressing America’s reciprocal tariff hikes.

An official said that zero-for-zero tariffs can be possible between the US and the European Union as both are developed and advanced nations.

The India-US agreement will always be a “package” deal that could include issues such as goods and non-tariff barriers, the official said, adding “it does not happen like this that if he will do ‘zero’ in electronics, we will also do in electronics. Trade agreements do not happen like this. It is wrong thinking”.

India and the US have been engaged in negotiating a bilateral trade agreement since March. Both sides have targeted to conclude the first phase of the pact by fall (September-October) of this year with an aim to more than double the bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030 from about $191 billion currently.

“The work has started for the agreement. India is far ahead of other countries in negotiating a trade deal,” the official added.

India and the US have decided to hold sector-specific talks in the coming weeks under the agreement. The decision to hold discussions in the coming weeks follows four days of talks between senior officers of India and the US that concluded on March 29.

In February, Delhi-based think tank GTRI suggested that India should propose a zero-for-zero tariff strategy to the US for addressing America’s tariff hikes. Under this strategy, it has stated that India can identify tariff lines (or product categories) where it can eliminate import duties for American imports and in lieu of that, the US should also remove duties on a similar number of goods.

In a trade pact, two countries either significantly reduce or eliminate customs duties on the maximum number of goods traded between them. They also ease norms to promote trade in services and boost investments.

While the US is looking at duty concessions in sectors like certain industrial goods, automobiles (electric vehicles particularly), wines, petrochemical products, dairy, agriculture items such as apples, tree nuts, and alfalfa hay; India may look at duty cuts for labour-intensive sectors like apparels, textiles, gems and jewellery, leather, plastics, chemicals, oil seeds, shrimp, and horticulture products.

From 2021-22 to 2023-24, the US was India’s largest trading partner. The US accounts for about 18% of India’s total goods exports, 6.22% in imports and 10.73% in bilateral trade.

With America, India had a trade surplus (the difference between imports and exports) of $35.32 billion in goods in 2023-24. This was $27.7 billion in 2022-23, $32.85 billion in 2021-22, $22.73 billion in 2020-21 and $17.26 billion in 2019-20.

In 2024, India’s main exports to the US included drug formulations and biologicals ($8.1 billion), telecom instruments ($6.5 billion), precious and semi-precious stones ($5.3 billion), petroleum products ($4.1 billion), gold and other precious metal jewellery ($3.2 billion), ready-made garments of cotton, including accessories ($2.8 billion), and products of iron and steel ($2.7 billion).

Imports included crude oil ($4.5 billion), petroleum products ($3.6 billion), coal, coke ($3.4 billion), cut and polished diamonds ($2.6 billion), electric machinery ($1.4 billion), aircraft, spacecraft and parts ($1.3 billion) and gold ($1.3 billion). NDTV Profit

The surprise step back by the Donald Trump administration late Friday evening could provide an edge to India vis-a-vis China. The US Customs and Border Protection has exempted smartphones, laptops and other electronic items from reciprocal tariffs—a move that is being seen especially beneficial for Apple, which contract manufactures iPhones in China, India and a bit in Brazil.

India could however lose its advantage if Trump scraps the duty on China because of fentanyl trade.

The exemption will enable China to export smartphones to the US at 20 per cent—a tariff imposed earlier by the Trump administration because of China’s alleged role in fentanyl trade. While in a major respite, China will escape the staggering 125 per cent tariff imposed earlier as reciprocal duties, India will be again able to export mobiles at zero duty to the US. India does not have to pay the mandated 10 per cent tariffs for 90 days and the subsequent 26 per cent reciprocal duties imposed earlier this month.

India could however lose its advantage if Trump scraps the duty on China because of fentanyl trade. Also, the US administration has indicated that there may be a fresh round of tariffs on electronic goods soon, without specifying the details. US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said on Sunday that the decision to exempt a range of electronic devices was a temporary reprieve.

In his first term, Trump had listened to Apple CEO Tim Cook and exempted penal duties on smartphone imports by the US, keeping it at zero. This time, global tariff war is already in play.

According to a senior consultancy firm executive who has worked with Apple Inc, the equation is simple. ‘’India has a cost disability with China on iPhones of around 12 per cent even after the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme. With the new tariff structuring, it will have a 8 per cent advantage.” He argues that considering the escalating tensions between the US and China on trade, it will make sense for Apple to increase its share of imports from India —which offers a secure supply source.

In the meantime, the play book of Apple Inc has changed quietly. Since 2018, its strategy has been to slowly hedge the bets in China and shift capacity in India for iPhones. In FY25, about 80 per cent of the iPhones shipped to the US came from China. But in the same year, the growing demand for iPhones in the US was met by India assembled phones including the latest iPhone 16 . Smartphones, led by iPhones, also became the largest exported item in value based on HS (harmonised system) code from India, surpassing diamonds for the first time.

The PLI scheme for mobile devices came in handy. Apple vendors (Tata Electronics and Foxconn) were able to hit exports of ₹150,000 crore (over $17.5 billion) of iPhones at FOB (free on board) value. That’s more than double of what they had committed to achieve under the scheme to the government in the fourth year. Half of that came from exports to US.

As a result, India’s share in the global production value of iPhones has now hit between 18 and 20 per cent. Even if it goes according to the normal plan and as JP Morgan had estimated, the share of global iPhone production should touch 25 per cent by FY 26–the final year of the PLI scheme with a production value of around $ 25-26 billion.

Can Apple speed things up for India? A top executive of a vendor company which supplies to Apple Inc pointed out that the aim should be to rework the global supply chain so that the bulk of the US iPhone demand is met from India, while China takes care of its own large domestic demand, that of Europe and Asia Pacific amongst others. ‘’This will not put Apple Inc under the vagaries of a US-China trade war.”

India must play its part to make this happen. Analysts believe that India would have to nearly double the production value of iPhones in the next 12 or may be 24 months.

On the positive side, both Apple vendors are putting in new plants for assembling iPhones which would be up and running by this year. But a lot will depend on how the Apple management is able to negotiate with the government to be able to expand quickly.

Experts point out that it won’t be an easy ride as the bulk of the supply chain (around 1,000 vendors) is based in China and seamlessly integrated with the iPhone assembly vendors. In India, there are still only a dozen odd local vendors, though numerous players like Tatas, Samvardhana Motherson and Wipro are getting in.

Then there are others who say the supply chain strength is over exaggerated—it took China 30 years to reach a value addition in iPhones of 38-40 per cent, India has

reached 15 per cent for Apple Inc in just four years and expects to go to 20 per cent in a year or so. There are challenges for sure–high input tax on components tops the list. Despite being lowered, there’s still a 2-3 per cent burden on overall cost of assembling a phone for exports in a hyper competitive market. Many lament that the tax structure in India is geared for domestic production and local consumption. Recently, a Niti Aayog report said that high tariffs on components significantly increases the cost of inputs and its simplification is the only answer.

On PLI for mobile devices, which ends in FY26, demand for an extension is getting louder for an export push. The cost disability, for which incentives were given, is still pretty high, industry representatives argue. An official at the ministry of electronics and information technology said no decision had been taken on the issue.

Apple could have other alternatives. Vietnam, for instance, looks attractive. It has a successful story with Samsung which exports over $60 billion of electronics and phones from the country and has BYD and Luxshare Precision making iPads and wearables for Apple Inc already. Like India, Vietnam is in the zero tariff bracket. It has already announced it’s ready to sign an agreement with the US on zero duty across items. But unlike India, Vietnam does not have a vibrant domestic market for iPhones. It also has labour shortage problems to grapple with.

There are also other destinations which are wooing Apple. Saudi Arabia is one such. It wants to build a large electronics SEZ hub and provide attractive incentives to bring in high tech into the country. There’s Singapore, which is known for ease of doing business. And Brazil, which already assembles iPhone 16 for the local market but has challenges in terms of high duties.

While the ball is in Apple’s court, the India story still needs a big push. Business Standard

The number of UK residents using digital identity apps will rise from 6.9 million in 2025 to 25.5 million in 2029; a growth of 267%, according to Juniper Research.

The forthcoming GOV.UK app will be a key driver; offering a government-authenticated and standardised approach to digital identity of which over 45% of the UK adult population are forecast to use by 2029.

The report identified that, despite a decrease in popularity of third-party identity apps, overall adoption of digital identities will increase. The GOV.UK app will drive this adoption significantly; presenting a regulated digital identity platform that streamlines access to government services.

An extract from the new report, Digital ID & Verification in the UK Market 2025-2029, is now available as a free download.

Third-party Providers to Take a Back Seat
The research found that third-party apps will grow by just 9% between 2025 and 2029; a result of the GOV.UK app becoming a primary method of verifying an individual’s information, both remotely and in-person. The introduction of this app will force third-party providers to re-strategise and place greater emphasis on advertising their verification services for onboarding onto the GOV.UK app.

Report author Thomas Wilson added: “In order to retain a role within the digital identity ecosystem, third-party identity providers must seek certification against the government’s trust framework, or they will be bypassed by certified providers and lose out on additional revenue.”

The report asserted the combination of government certification and third-party verification technologies as critical to overcoming concerns among UK citizens around privacy, which have been a long-term stumbling block to digital identity growth and promoting further adoption. Juniper Research

U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday said he would be announcing the tariff rate on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be flexibility on some companies in the sector.

Trump spoke with reporters aboard Air Force One as he traveled back to Washington from his estate in West Palm Beach. Reuters

Ireland’s data regulator, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), that it has opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over the social media platform’s use of personal data collected from European users to train Grok.

The DPC will investigate how X processes personal data “comprised” in publicly accessible posts by European users for the purposes of training generative AI models, according to a Reuters report. The powerful Irish privacy regulator has issued fines to Microsoft, TikTok, and Meta in the past. Its fines to Meta total almost €3 billion (roughly $3.38 billion).

X quietly opted in users to sharing data with xAI, Musk’s AI company, to train its AI chatbot Grok, in 2024. Last month, Musk announced that xAI had acquired X.

Ireland’s data regulator can impose fines of up to 4% of a company’s global revenue under the EU’s GDPR rules, which require that companies have a valid legal basis for processing people’s data. The agency’s latest inquiry comes after it sought a court order last year to restrict X from processing European user data for AI training. Tech Crunch

U.S. federal budget cuts have started to have some early impact on space startups after funding for such companies dropped 12.5% in the first quarter, according to investment firm Seraphim Space.

Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency and the Trump administration have been delaying or cancelling contracts across its agencies to curb federal spending.

“Within certain government departments, uncertainty is causing delays as they assess which contracts to move forward with,” Seraphim Space investment analyst Lucas Bishop said.

Space startups — which garnered $2.1 billion in investments in the first quarter — have largely relied on government contracts over the past few years as rising geopolitical tensions led to a surge in demand for imaging and analytics.

Following strong stock performance of space companies such as Rocket Lab and Redwire late last year, Voyager Space filed to go public in January, while Karman Holdings listed in February.

But the early momentum is fading with uncertainty sparked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and ensuing market volatility, Seraphim Space said.
Investments in the January-March period were concentrated in companies that make and operate space hardware such as rockets and satellites. The first quarter saw the two largest fundraising rounds from Stoke Space and Loft Orbital, together bringing in $430 million.

“More protectionist trade policies could slow development in the short term, as many advanced space technologies — from propulsion systems to high-performance materials — depend on global supply chains,” said former NASA division chief Robert Ambrose.

However, in times of economic uncertainty, commercial spaceflight and space technology companies have become more critical partners, enabling cost-effective missions, said Ambrose, who is also chairman at Alliant robotics.

Investments in space startups rose 12% to $8.1 billion in the 12 months to March, with the number of deals in Europe rising nearly 50% in the first quarter on bigger European Union budgets and a renewed focus on self-reliance. Reuters

Public Wi-Fi hotspots seemed like a good idea five years ago when the government rolled out a scheme to provide affordable internet nationwide through a network of neighbourhood data providers. High-speed 5G network services hadn’t been rolled out yet, and Wi-Fi was still the most reliable way to access the internet.

However, the Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface (PM-Wani) scheme has been struggling to take off as key stakeholders argue over the tariffs.

The government has now proposed that telecom operators offer bandwidth at low rates to neighbourhood stores and other retailers deploying Wi-Fi hotspots under the PM-Wani scheme, but the telcos see these so-called public data offices, or PDOs, as competition.

“They are buying the service (bandwidth) for reselling. Why should any operator be forced to provide its network services to its competitors at the arbitrarily regulated prices for building their network,” Ravi Gandhi, president and chief regulatory officer of Reliance Jio, told the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) during a recent discussion. Mint was present at the discussion.

TRAI, in its recent draft telecommunication tariff (71st amendment) order, proposed that telcos do not charge PDOs more than double what they charge retail customers for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) services.

Jio, in a written submission to TRAI, estimated that if the reduced tariff rate order is implemented, a PDO could get unlimited data at ₹798 from telecom operators and sell at least 1 GB (gigabyte) of data each to 1,000 customers every month at ₹10 per GB.

Telecom operators, which charge about ₹19 for a 1 GB mobile data pack, could lose their users.

In September, the department of telecommunications amended the PM-Wani framework, removing the requirement for PDOs to enter into commercial agreements with telecom operators for internet connectivity.

This was done to ensure that telcos do not force PDOs to get bandwidth through expensive internet leased lines but a regular FTTH broadband connection, which telcos are not keen on.

‘Not in competition’
The government had aimed to deploy about 10 million public Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by 2022, and 50 million by 2030. However, only about 280,000 hotspots have been deployed so far, and nearly half of those are in Delhi, per government data.

As on 5 December, the number of unique PM-Wani users was 1.8 million, and a total 58.55 PB (petabytes) of data had been consumed, the data showed. One PB is about 1 million GB.

Broadband India Forum, which represents big tech companies, blamed the dearth of public Wi-Fi hotspots in India on ‘predatory pricing’ by telecom operators. It claimed telecom operators were charging up to ₹8 lakh per annum from PDOs for providing bandwidth.

“This PM-Wani architecture is not in competition with telcos, it is complementary to them,” T.V. Ramachandran, president of Broadband India Forum, said at the TRAI meeting. “It will add value to the mobile operators… PM-Wani is an important element of digital public infrastructure where affordability and usability is a key requirement.”

Ramachandran argued that for small entrepreneurs deploying Wi-Fi hotspots, broadband tariffs need to be the same as retail FTTH tariffs.

While PDOs provide data sachets to users at ₹5-10 per day under the PM-Wani scheme, they have been arguing that this is not viable due to the high tariffs charged by telecom operators.

There are more than 200 public data office aggregators operating in the country, according to the PM-Wani central registry.

Rahul Vatts, chief regulatory officer at Bharti Airtel Ltd, said tariff intervention would reverse years of consistent policy that had favoured tariff forbearance (allowing telecom operators to fix their own charges) and market-driven innovation.

“FTTH is a retail product and not meant for resale. PDOs operate as commercial resellers serving multiple end users simultaneously and demanding consistent bandwidth, reliability and network management that FTTH is not engineered for,” Vatts said at the TRAI meeting.

As per PM-Wani data, about 45% of the public Wi-Fi hotspots deployed under the scheme so far are in Delhi. “We realised that the deployment has not really been in the rural sector. It’s been considerably invested in the urban sector,” said Ambika Khurana, chief regulatory officer, Vodafone Idea, which only recently began rolling out its 5G services. LiveMint

When Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee met Vietnam’s prime minister in July, he had a simple message to convey.

“Vietnam’s success is Samsung’s success, and Vietnam’s development is Samsung’s development,” Lee told Pham Minh Chinh, pledging long-term investment to make the country its biggest manufacturing base for display products.

Since the South Korean conglomerate entered Vietnam in 1989, it has poured billions of dollars into expanding its global manufacturing footprint beyond China. Many of its peers followed after U.S. President Donald Trump placed tariffs on Chinese goods in his first term.

The pioneering move has made Samsung Vietnam’s biggest foreign investor and exporter.

About 60% of the 220 million phones Samsung sells each year globally are made in Vietnam, and many are destined for the U.S., where Samsung is the No. 2 smartphone vendor, according to research firm Counterpoint.

Now, that reliance on Vietnam threatens to backfire as Hanoi is racing to negotiate with the Trump administration to lower a punishing potential 46% tariff that has exposed the vulnerability of the Southeast Asian country’s export model.

While Vietnam and Samsung won a reprieve this week after Trump paused the rate at 10% for 90 days, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people, including at Samsung and its suppliers, show the company would be a primary victim should higher U.S. tariffs take effect in July.

“Vietnam is where we produce most of our smartphones, but the tariffs (initially) came out much higher than expected for the country, so there’s a sense of confusion internally,” said a Samsung executive, who like some others was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject.

Even if the two countries reach an agreement, Vietnam’s roughly $120 billion trade surplus with the U.S. has put it in the sights of a U.S. administration targeting such imbalances. Hanoi hopes to get the duties reduced to a range of 22% to 28%, if not lower, Reuters has reported.

Amid the uncertainty, Samsung and its suppliers are considering adjusting production, said four people familiar with the matter. That could involve increasing output in India or South Korea, though such steps would be costly and time-consuming, they said. Reuters

A committee, comprising senior officers from the state and central governments, has been formed to address the land reservation roadblock concerning the plots belonging to MTNL and BSNL, sources close to the development told the FPJ.

The long-awaited plan to monetise the land belonging to Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) remains stuck as most of their plots have been reserved for public amenities in the development plan (DP). Having senior officers from the BMC, MTNL and BSNL, the committee has been given a month’s deadline to come up with a solution.

The panel has been formed at the behest of the Union ministry of communications, led by Jyotiraditya Scindia, who recently met Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to discuss the issue.

According to sources, there are 117 properties listed for monetisation; of which just one land parcel has been leased out by the state government. Most of the MTNL and BSNL properties in Mumbai are either on the plots leased out by the BMC or the Centre, they added. Sources also said that the BMC has deleted a few reservations and has also stopped the use of a public amenity.

What apparently irked the Union ministry is the reservation of MTNL and BSNL lands for public amenities by the BMC. While the central government wants all such reservations to be deleted from the DP, the civic body thinks that such tags can not be done away with outrightly. Instead, the BMC is believed to have said that the reservations can be realigned or relocated in such a manner that both the central public sector utilities can fetch better prices for their lands.

The Centre decided to monetise the properties way back in 2019. An advertisement for the purpose was issued last year. Free Press Journal