Every dairy farmer knows that once the milk leaves his shed, he loses all say over what it becomes. It returns as cheese and butter, under someone else's brand, at someone else's price. For generations, Indian cotton sailed to Lancashire and came home as cloth. India grew the fibre; Britain owned the looms.
Today the crop is data. Nearly 1.5 billion Indians, holding well over a billion internet subscriptions, sow it every hour: searches, swipes, voice notes in a dozen languages, payments, and detours on a map. We call them customers. They are also the harvest.
The grain does not stay home. A prompt typed in Hinglish, a voice note in Bhojpuri, and a correction made to a chatbot: where the fine print allows, each is a sack loaded onto a ship bound for a foreign mill. There it is threshed into the large language models now sold back to us by monthly subscription.
The millers know the worth of this crop. In 2025 OpenAI made ChatGPT Go free for a year to everyone in India; Google handed Jio's roughly 500 million customers 18 months of Gemini AI Pro; Perplexity gave Airtel users a free year of Pro. Analysts told Reuters the giveaways fill training-data gaps on Indian languages and behaviour. By February 2026, India had 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, OpenAI's second-largest market.
The first loaf is free. The next is priced in dollars, baked from our own wheat.
The five great mills are worth over $14 trillion between them. Whatever they sell, be it phones, software or ads, what keeps their wheels turning is human signal: it trains their algorithms, sharpens their ads and now feeds their AI. Across the flagship platforms that disclose users, roughly one account in six is Indian.
Market values at close on 4 November 2026 (source). India's share = Indian users of the flagship platform over its global users; the total excludes Apple. (a) Apple publishes no users by country; this is Apple India's FY26 revenue (₹1,03,853 crore) as a share of Apple's FY26 sales of $478.8 billion. (b) X's last standalone value, when xAI bought it in 2025; it now sits inside SpaceX-xAI, valued at $1.25 trillion at their February 2026 merger.
When a container of basmati leaves Kandla, it is weighed, valued and recorded. When a crore of Indian conversations leave for a server farm in Oregon, nothing is. Yet data is bought and sold here like any commodity: advertisers pay for Indian attention, and AI labs give away subscriptions to gather Indian speech.
The usual answer is the end-user licence agreement, the EULA we all click without reading. But an EULA is a private contract between a user and a company. It can transfer rights over content; it cannot sign away a sovereign's right to tax value created on its soil. A farmer who agrees to a price with a trader has not exempted his harvest from mandi fees.
India has already conceded the principle. Its significant economic presence test treats a foreign firm that solicits 3 lakh Indian users as having a taxable footprint. Tax treaties blunt it, and the 6% equalisation levy on digital ads was scrapped from April 2025. The grain still leaves untaxed.
Price the grain at the bakery rather than the farm gate, and India's tax harvest runs from about ₹31,000 crore to ₹93,000 crore a year.
The farm-gate price is what these firms book here. Google billed Indian advertisers ₹34,742 crore in FY25, about 1% of Alphabet's revenue, though Indians are nearly a fifth of YouTube's audience. We are a fifth of the granary and a hundredth of the till.
Weight each company's latest annual revenue by India's share of its users, and the Indian grain in these mills is worth about $164 billion a year.
Even the lower figure is nine times what the old levy reaped. These are illustrative sums at ₹94.4 to the dollar; a real levy would need treaty diplomacy and credit for taxes already paid here.
None of this argues for walls. Data must travel; a sealed granary rots. But a nation that exports raw grain and imports finished bread pays twice: once in lost value, once in dependence. A data levy could seed what the IndiaAI Mission has only begun: Indian mills, models trained on Indian tongues, owned here and sold abroad.
The Swadeshi movement knew that growing cotton was not owning a textile industry. Make in India must now mean milling in India. Otherwise the world's data granary will keep buying back its own bread and paying for the privilege.
Yogi Kochhar, President, Yotta Foundation
Yogi Kochhar is the President at Yotta Foundation. He is a globally acclaimed AI evangelist, maven and author.
Sources
Market values at 4 Nov 2026 close: FinHacker; SpaceX-xAI merger and X's 2025 value: Fortune
Users: YouTube India and global (ColorWhistle, citing DataReportal); WhatsApp India (Hy perleap) and global (Nairametrics); LinkedIn India (Storyboard18) and global (NewKerala); X (Charle Agency)
Revenues: Alphabet 2025 (DQ India); Meta 2025 (Paperjam); Microsoft FY26 (Pulse0); Apple FY26 (iClarified); Apple India FY26 (Angel One)
Rupee at ₹41 on 5 Nov 2026: ThePrint
About the Author: Yogi Kochhar is the President of the Yotta Foundation, as well as a globally acclaimed AI evangelist, maven, and author. A prominent thought leader, his work focuses on artificial intelligence strategy, technological innovation, and driving human-centric digital transformation.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the publisher. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information, the publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information.
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