Govt likely to unveil draft of data protection bill today

NEW DELHI: A draft of the proposed Data Protection Bill is likely to be announced on Wednesday as the government moves ahead a consultative process after abruptly withdrawing the previous proposal in August.
Official sources said that the draft of the new bill is likely to come on Wednesday, carrying important proposals that handle issues related to consumer data as well as data localisation and its cross-border movement for processing.
The government sprung a surprise on August 3 when it spiked the much-debated Data Protection Bill from the Parliament, while promising to introduce a new legislation "very soon, but without any dilution to broader privacy aspects of the original bill and without any compromise to the Right to Privacy" as provided by the Supreme Court in its historic judgment given in August 2017.
The original Bill, which was the culmination of a work that began around five years back after the formation of the Justice Srikrishna Committee, had been introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 2019 following which it was referred to the Joint Committee of Parliament which took nearly two years to submit its recommendations and present a draft bill towards the end of last year.