MeitY Extends Last Date Of Public Comments On DPDP Bill To January 2nd

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has today extended the date of public feedback on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB) 2022 to 2nd January 2023 from 17th December.

“In response to the requests received from several stakeholders, the Ministry has decided to extend the last date for receipt of comments till 2nd January 2023,” said MeitY in a statement. 

The development has come a month after the Centre republished the DPDP Bill after withdrawing it last year, due to various suggestions made by the joint parliamentary committee (JPC). 

The recent draft also has overlooked certain aspects such as limited scope on personal data, not considering the data usage by blockchain and crypto industry, and penalising data fiduciaries for non-compliance, among others.

Data fiduciaries refers to an individual or group of people that need to share the purpose and means of processing users personal data. 

Under the draft bill, the Centre will create the Data Protection Board of India which will ascertain data fiduciaries that are not adhering to the provisions (laid in the bill) and will penalise them up to INR 500 Cr. 

“The Board may, in the event of a personal data breach, direct the Data Fiduciary to adopt any urgent measures to remedy such personal data breach or mitigate any harm caused to Data Principals,” the Centre had said.

Besides, under section 16 of the Bill, the Centre has also asked individual users to comply with all provisions such as not registering false complaints against data fiduciaries and data protection board, not hiding material information and impersonating another person, among others. 

In the case of non-compliance, such users will be penalised up to INR 10,000 as per the Bill.

Add to that, the Centre has not considered the impact of the data protection bill on the blockchain industry. A few days ago, Crypto Legal and Indian Blockchain Forum (IBF) shared a discussion paper on the DPDP bill stating that the Bill failed to address issues faced by blockchain and other allied sectors.

According to the IBF, decentralised blockchain platforms find difficulty in identifying a particular person or a group of people and later, determining the purpose and means of processing their personal data.

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