The New Era Of Data Protection In India

The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (the Bill) was tabled before the lower house of the Parliament on 11.12.2019

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India as a country is home to 1/7th of the world’s population. Furthermore, India has a young demographic which has access to two important tools – (i) smartphones and (ii) attractive data tariffs. The unique combination of these factors makes India the world’s most attractive destination for digital platforms. These digital platforms are uniquely poised to bring together buyers and sellers for various goods and services by providing a seamless user experience, by leveraging one key resource: DATA.

Conversations revolving around use of personal data as a key resource for an organization has increased in recent times due to the following factors: the explosion of social media applications and website, the success of digital e-commerce platforms, and the recognition of privacy as a fundamental right available to every person under the Constitution of India. Furthermore, after realizing the success that digital businesses have had by leveraging data, traditional business have also recognized the importance of data and have made data a central focus of their business strategies.

This resulted in growing discussions demanding the installation of a robust data protection framework to ensure that personal data of individuals is collected for legitimate purposes by businesses. The framework shall also enable the Government to exercise regulatory control over businesses which seek to use personal data as a resource. Further, businesses also require legislative certainty to understand their compliance requirements towards issues like handling personal data, cross-border transfer of data, data localization, etc. In the afore-stated background, the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (the Bill) was tabled before the lower house of the Parliament on 11.12.2019.