THE PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION BILL 2019 A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION OR WRONG START

The numerous critical issues left ambiguous greatly influence the architecture of processing and storage systems, especially on database levels, where most certainly there will be a large volume of work on identifying all types of different data

On 11th December 2019, the Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad introduced the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (hereinafter “Bill”) in the Parliament. The Bill seeks to provide for protection of personal data of individuals, and establishes a Data Protection Authority for the same. Mr. Prasad announced that the Bill shall be examined by a Joint Parliamentary Committee for review, but it’s unclear when that will happen.

Background

In 2012, a committee headed by Justice A P Shah had submitted a Report by Group of Experts on privacy, which proposed a conceptual framework for a privacy statute in India and how Indian Privacy law should take shape. This was followed by a consultation paper on Privacy, Security and ownership of Data in the Telecom sector published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on 9th August 2017. This was another endeavor to effectively enforce the “fundamental right to privacy” recognized by the Supreme Court of India in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy judgment earlier in 2017.

Subsequently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, vide its Notification No.3 (6)J2017-CLES (hereinafter referred to as “Notification”) had constituted a “Committee of Experts” under the Chairmanship of former Supreme Court Justice ‘Shri B N Srikrishna’ on issues relating to data protection in India and drafting a bill on data protection.