Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023: Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology introduced Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 in the Parliament on Thursday, the Bill was introduced by respective Imcumbent Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw. Ministry has tabled this Bill again in the Parliament after receiving more than 21000 comments from the public and in-depth comsultations with 46 sector organisations.
The Bill was strongly opposed by the opposition members quoting the reason that this Bill violates the Fundamental right to privacy, opposition demanded the bill to be srutinized by the standing committee. They added that a bill on Data Protection was already withdrawn by the Government last year and this new bills need more scrutiny and deliberations to be reframed.
Union Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw said that this not a money bill that needs to referred to standing committee necessarily, he further added that all the issues raised by the opposition will be answered during the debate. The Ministry aims for the procesing of Digital Data Protection in a manner “that recognises both the rights od individual to protect their personal data and the need to process such data for lawful purposes”.
Personal Data Protection Bill was introduced in Parliament for the first time in 2019, in which the parliamentary standing committee after a long deliberations recommmended changes to it, citing the changes as feedback from stakeholders and various agencies, eventually that bill was withdrawn by Government last year. Coming again with the new draft bill, called Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 in November and published it in the Government Authorised Platform for consultations and feedbacks.
The New Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 this time comes after receiving more than 21000 comments by the public and in-depth consultations with 46 Sector organisation, associations and industry bodies. While commenting on the new Data Protection Bill, a Delhi-based legal Non-Profit Organisation, Software Freedom Law Centre commonly known as SLFC qouted that “The Digital Data Protection Bill, 2023 has been introduced as a financial Bill. The Government has been given a lot of powers under the bill and there is no sufficient legoislative guidance provided regarding these. Government hs also deleted Section 43 A Of the IT Act which provided the remedy to aggrieved persons to get compensation from the Government.
The Organisation added that ” “However, the bill does not provide for compensation to be granted for data principals whose privacy has been violated and has suffered a loss. Deemed consent that had raised red flags earlier has been reworded but principally remains the same. Data Principals have been saddled with duties and penalties prescribed for acting in violation of these. Cross-border data flow has been changed from whitelisting to blacklisting regime which is a welcome change.”
Software Freedom Law Centre also argued, “However, such data transfer restrictions are permitted in the case of specific laws in existence. A problematic provision is a clause added in the bill for blocking a computer resource which could be used for blocking websites and applications. Although the consultation process took a long time, the Government does not seem to have considered the inputs received from stakeholders and recommendations from the JPC.”
Disclaimer- All the information provided in this article is retrieved through the inputs from ANI.
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