India Inc comes to Gujarat

Ambani had previously spoken of leveraging the Jio network for launching some sort of an e-commerce venture. During Q3 FY19, Jio added 27.9 million subscribers, which is marginally down from the 28.4 million subscribers it added the previous quarter (Q2 FY19).

Asserting that the data is the "new oil and wealth" in the new world, he said India's data must be controlled and owned by Indian people and not by corporates, especially global corporations.

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Friday made a desperate plea to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him to take immediate steps against what he termed was data colonisation particularly by worldwide companies.

In a speech in the western state of Gujarat, its chairman Mukesh Ambani laid out plans to deepen the conglomerate's commitment to retail by creating a new commerce platform, blending online retail with brick and mortar stores, that aims to empower India's unorganized retail sector to compete against the likes of Amazon.com and Walmart-owned rival Flipkart.

"In this new world, data is the new oil".

"Gandhiji led India's movement against political colonisation". Ambani said that India now needed similar movement against data colonisation.

Calling the Prime Minister a "man of action", Mr. Ambani urged him to make the movement against data colonisation one of the principal goals of the Digital India mission. The company's wholesale stores will help stock these mom-and-pop operations, they said.

The draft PDP Bill mandates live data mirroring or localisation (meaning that at least one copy of all personal user data must be stored in India), which will drive up costs for companies.

The government is considering a draft data security law that requires data centres for all companies be physically located within India.

The draft data privacy bill recommends restrictions on the transfer and storage of information by global giants from Facebook to Google.

While there is not much information on the upcoming initiative, Bloomberg reports that the platform will likely be launched within 12 to 18 months, across the country. Under which, foreign e-retailers Amazon are forbidden from selling products via companies in which they own equity. It is evident that Reliance Jio, after the telecom sector, will look at ways to disrupt the e-commerce sector in India.