US senators John Cornyn and Mark Warner, who are co-chairmen of the Senate India Caucus, have written to Modi on Friday asking him to adopt "light touch" regulatory framework that would allow data to flow freely across borders.
New Delhi: With just two days to go for the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) deadline to payment companies to store domestic transactions data inside the country, two US senators have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to soften the stand.
According to Reuters, US senators John Cornyn and Mark Warner, who are co-chairmen of the Senate India Caucus, have written to Modi on Friday asking him to adopt "light touch" regulatory framework that would allow data to flow freely across borders.
In April, RBI issued a notification to all multinational payments companies that entire data of domestic payment transactions should be "stored in a system only in India". The deadline to comply with this is October 15, two days from today.
"All system providers shall ensure that the entire data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India. This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details/information collected/carried/processed as part of the message/payment instruction," RBI had said in a notification in April.
With RBI unlikely to extend the deadline, US Senators, in a letter to PM Modi, wrote, "We see this as a fundamental issue to the further development of digital trade and one that is crucial to our economic partnership."
RBI's move is set to affect global campanies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express. They have been lobbying the finance ministry and RBI to relax the guidelines.
(With inputs from agencies)
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