India To Get Own Tech Platform? After Pronoun Debate, Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal Vows To Build Indian Tech Platform

Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola, recently criticised what he referred to as the 'pronoun illness' after LinkedIn's AI chatbot mistakenly addressed him as 'They' instead of 'He.' He condemned the 'woke' policies of platforms like LinkedIn and Microsoft, attributing them to Western culture, and announced his intention to create an Indian tech platform.

Concerned that Indian culture will be subsumed by Western culture

In a post on X, he writes, "Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can't criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out."

OLA founder Bhavish Aggarwal | ET

The 38-year-old entrepreneur adds, "But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows."

Agarwal suggests building India¡¯s own tech platforms as the solution to this.

Regarding his company, ride-hailing service Ola, he mentioned that they would be transferring all their work from Microsoft's cloud service Azure to their own Krutrim cloud within the next week.

How Bhavish suggests building India¡¯s own tech platform

Agarwal states, "While we can't do anything about Linkedin¡¯s monopoly overnight, I¡¯m making a commitment to work with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework. DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc are a uniquely Indian idea and is even more needed in the world of social media.'

LinkedIn

He emphasised that community guidelines should be based on Indian law, rejecting corporate authority to determine bans. Additionally, he advocated for data ownership by creators rather than corporations profiting from user data.

Comments showed support. One person wrote, "This is an important cultural battle sir, and very glad that you are keeping the fight on. Many expected you to withdraw your posts because we all know just how much of an intolerant bullies the DEI wokes are. But you're still taking them on."

Another agree, saying, "Agree with you fully; woke culture should not be imposed on Indians and India."

For more news and current affairs from around the world, please visit Indiatimes News.