India’s central bank has agreed to look into concerns about data storage rules that were raised by the Trump administration and US-based firms such as Mastercard and Visa.
These foreign companies had stored data in India after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) made changes in data storage rules last year.
This April, the RBI asked payment firms to ensure their data was stored exclusively on local servers to ensure “better monitoring” and to provide “unfettered supervisory access to data stored” with the system providers and with their “service providers/intermediaries/ third party vendors and other entities in the payment ecosystem".
The decision was taken in an important meeting chaired by country’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in which all companies “put forth their concerns related to RBI data storage requirements and processing related guidelines” issued by the RBI.
“The Deputy Governor of RBI, B.P. Kanungo, assured the industry representatives that the Reserve Bank of India will look into this,” a statement issued by the ministry said on Tuesday.
The decision will definitely have a positive impact on the tariff war that has been niggling between the US and India for the last two years. On 15 June, the Indian government imposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 120 per cent on 28 kinds of US goods, after more than seven extensions since June 2018. The US also revoked the GSP (the Generalised System of Preferences) status for India earlier this month which put over 2,000 Indian exports in higher tariffs category.
