The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill 2019 will be tabled in the winter session of Parliament. As India right now doesn’t really have a data protection regime, it is this legislation that will lay the foundation for protection of an individual’s privacy in the digital age.
The Bill is also of great importance for corporates – both Indian firms as well as foreign ones that operate in India and process the data of Indians – as they will have to bear the compliance costs. Another big stakeholder is the government itself. In India, along with the private sector, the state itself has been a keen player in the data game. Through a multitude of policy measures and mechanisms, the most well known among them being Aadhaar, it has been collecting and storing huge quantities of data with very little accountability.
So, there are a lot of expectations riding on a robust data protection regime, which should, ideally, be on a par with the international gold standard in data protection, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). So, how robust is the PDP Bill, and how will its provisions affect us? Most critically, is it likely to protect citizens’ privacy from encroachment by both state and private sector?
We look for answers to these questions in this episode.
Guest: Kritika Bharwaj, Delhi-based advocate and Fellow with the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University, Delhi.
Host: G. Sampath
