Govt Readies New Data Bill For Next Parliament Session: Report

Hours after reports surfaced that the government had pulled the Personal Data Protection Bill, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in an interaction with ET stated that the new Data Bill is almost ready and will be put out for public consultation and subsequent government approvals very soon. 

“We will go through the entire approval process soon and present the new Bill in the next or forthcoming session,” he said.

Vaishnaw added that when the joint committee of parliament provided a detailed review of the PDP Bill, it recommended 81 amendments in the 99 sections and made 12 suggestions. “Considering those, we had to come up with a new Bill and the old Bill had to be withdrawn,” he said.

While the core principles and the conceptual pieces of the Right to Privacy framework will remain the same, the new Bill aims to consider the fundamental requirements of the digital economy. 

“We must have a safe, trusted internet and accountability from social media platforms. All those things are fundamental requirements for today’s digital economy and have been considered in the new draft,” he told the publication.

The information comes shortly after the government said that compliance for startups would have become significantly more difficult had the PDP Bill been passed into law. While the PDP Bill emphasised the dos and don’ts of personal data collection, the newer Bill will draw focus on data privacy, accountability and even likely add non-personal data.

IT Minister of State Rajeev Chandrashekhar added that the existing Bill will soon be replaced by a comprehensive framework of the global standards including digital privacy laws for contemporary and future challenges.

Are These Recommendations & New Data Bill Right?

To note, while the government is undertaking the recommendations by the JPC, in February 2022, IAMAI had commented that the recommendations were likely to negatively impact a cross-section of tech industry segments such as large tech companies, tech services companies as well as digital startups who form the backbone of India’s tech leadership aspirations.

The PDP Bill, 2021 had placed broad guidelines for personal data and sensitive personal data along with recommendations about regulations on social media platforms and data localisation.

But IAMAI had commented that JPC’s recommendation for stringent data localisation requirements will lead to difficulties in compliance and will be harmful to global and domestic companies alike. It had also called the recommendation to include non-personal data premature and asked it to reconsider treating intermediaries as publishers under certain circumstances.

It added, “The government should also review the transparency requirement suggested by the JPC. It is very broad and may encroach upon the data fiduciaries’ intellectual property rights. It may be harmful to data fiduciaries if they are mandated to publicly disclose their algorithms and other proprietary information, without adequate safeguards.”