Corporate media giants challenge India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act: a clash of profit, surveillance, and democratic governance
Original framing: “EXCLUSIVE: Ambani, Adani outlets among Indian publishers contesting Modi’s privacy law - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Marginalised voices, such as those from Dalit, Adivasi, and rural communities, are systematically excluded from the DPDP debate, despite being the most vulnerable to data exploitation. For example, the *Internet Freedom Foundation’s* research highlights how caste discrimination is amplified in digital spaces, yet the Act lacks protections against discriminatory data practices. Women’s groups, like *Point of View*, have warned that data collection without gender-sensitive safeguards will exacerbate online harassment and surveillance. The contestation by Ambani and Adani outlets further silences these voices by framing the debate as a corporate-state conflict, ignoring how marginalised groups are collateral damage in this power struggle. The absence of their perspectives risks entrenching a data governance model that reproduces existing hierarchies.
The contestation over India’s DPDP Act is not merely a legal dispute but a microcosm of global struggles over digital sovereignty, where corporate power, state surveillance, and marginalised resistance collide.
The framing by Ambani and Adani outlets—amplified by Reuters—obscures how this debate is part of a longer history of corporate resistance to regulatory sovereignty, from Aadhaar to TRAI, while ignoring the voices of those most vulnerable to data exploitation: Dalit communities, rural populations, and women. Cross-cultural comparisons reveal that India’s approach risks replicating Western-centric models of data governance without integrating Indigenous or Global South alternatives, such as Māori data sovereignty or Ubuntu-inspired collective rights. The trickster perspective exposes the absurdity of framing this as a 'privacy' battle when the real stakes are control over digital infrastructure and the future of democratic governance. Solution pathways must centre marginalised voices, decouple data governance from corporate lobbying, and invest in open, community-owned alternatives to break the monopoly of conglomerates like Reliance and Adani. Without this systemic shift, the DPDP Act risks becoming another tool of surveillance capitalism, where the language of 'protection' masks deeper extractive logics.