Airtel seeks sovereign stack to control Indians' data processed overseas

Bharti Airtel has questioned fragmented approach in rules at present to allow data processing of Indians overseas and has pushed for control on local data using sovereign cloud, a senior company official has said.

Speaking at Global Fintech Fest 2026, Bharti Airtel, Group CRO and Director -- Corporate Affairs, Rahul Vatts -- said it is not correct to equate local data residency with data sovereignty but it is about controlling the data with a sovereign technology stack.

He said the government came up with the first circular on this, which is actually quite pathbreaking "and the government has had very detailed discussions over the last 30-45 days as to what we should be really looking at".

He said while the government remains proactive, two areas that should always be important for us to keep -- one is to have a clear discussion on where the control plane is and the manner in which it will be managed.

"The second part is that we need to get away from this fragmented policy approach