Draft DPDP bill draws from experiences of several countries: IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

Speaking at the second edition of the CII Global Economic Policy Summit on Thursday, Vaishnaw said that the draft of the new bill on data protection meets all the tests and principles that Supreme Court has laid out.

“The government’s intent is absolutely clear on the subject. All the principles of maintaining and protecting people’s privacy are today well established…these principles which we strictly adhere to,” Vaishnaw said.

Earlier in the evening, the minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the draft of the Digital India Act would be out for public consultation by the end of this month.
“The Digital India Act will be ready for public consultation by the end of this month. We hope that we will be able to take both these bills (the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill of 2022 and the Digital India Act) to the Parliament, hopefully together,” Chandrasekhar said.

The Digital India Act (DIA), which is in the final stages of being drafted, is pegged to replace the 22-year-old Information Technology Act of 2000.

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on December 6 had reported that the DIA, modelled on the drafts of the country’s Telecom Bill and the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, is expected to be simpler like the two bills, leaving space for executive rulemaking in the future given the changing technology landscape.

Speaking at the event, Chandrasekhar also emphasised that the draft of the DPDP Bill of 2022 had also moved away from the belief that any legislation on data protection had to be modelled on the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union.

“For the last several years, there was a belief that the GDPR in Europe was the model and we had to in some sense follow that. We have said in this bill that we will chart our own model. We have our own principles of how we see data and how we deal with them,” he said.