Why we should put our attention to Indian Startup Poster boy Vijay Shekhar Sharma's 'Google Nirbhar Bharat' remark ?

Recently Google removed Paytm from its app store citing Paytm has violated Google play store gambling policy. Later Paytm removed its disputed cashback feature to get back to the play store. But this did not end here as Indian startup poster boy Paytm's billionaire founder VSS (Vijay Shekhar Sharma) criticized Google for its policies and used the term "Google Nirbhar Bharat". Lately, CEO of PhonePe (another famous Indian fintech startup) Sameer Nigam came out and supported VSS. Amid this let's find out why this needs our attention.

• What's the story?

So it all started on 18 September after Google removed Paytm from its play-store claiming it has violated the play-store gambling policy. Paytm, India's most preferred financial and service app with close to 50 Million monthly active users and currently valued roughly at 16 Bn USD was removed from the play-store just like that without any notice to the users or the Government of India, creating panic among the millions of users if their deposits were safe. 

This raises a serious concern over the Government's push towards Digital economy and online transactions when they don't have a stronghold regulating the online market places. Now imagine you are a digital banking customer like most of the millennials and prefer all of your transactions through your favorite banking app and suddenly google decides to remove it from its play-store claiming some violations , where you would go? 

• What's next ?

With the current digital dependency on big tech giants like Google, Facebook, it is really challenging for the government to regulate and structure proper digital laws. Although this is the high time for the government to take strong calls on this because the more it will delay , tougher it will become and we may head to a future where our democratic rights are only exercised just to elect a government even when we are actually ruled by a tech giant.