Nirmala Sitharaman says bill on data privacy will be ready ‘soon’
PremiumLast month, the central government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 from the Lok Sabha
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has assured that the new bill on data privacy will be ready "soon" and the Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has been diligently working on it.
"We will soon have a new Data Privacy Bill, which will be a product of consultations and will address every such concern most of us had on the privacy Bill," she said at the ongoing India Ideas Summit organised by US-India Business Council.
Last month, the central government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 from the Lok Sabha several months after it was introduced. Ashwini Vaishnaw had said the Bill was withdrawn because the Joint Parliamentary Committee recommended 81 amendments in a bill of 99 sections.
"Above that it made 12 major recommendations. Therefore, the bill has been withdrawn and a new bill will be presented for public consultation," he had then tweeted.
The bill had proposed to create three categories of personal data, sensitive personal data and critical personal data, with each having separate regulations and compliances. The bill proposed firms would have to tell users of their data collection practices, while consumers’ consent for storing and removing data was to be obtained. However, the bill exempted government agencies from its provisions; yet, they could get non-personal anonymized data from data fiduciaries.
The Bill aimed to provide protection of digital privacy to individuals relating to their personal data, specify the flow and usage of data, and create a relationship of trust between persons and entities processing the data.
The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, was prepared by a high-level expert group headed by former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna.
The PDP bill was first brought to the Parliament in 2019 and passed on to the JCP for examination at the time.
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