According to Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the parliamentary standing committee on IT has given a nod to the Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB).
“I would like to share some good news that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT and communications, which is the committee which deals with this subject, before the bill is taken to the Parliament, have in advance examined it, and then given a big thumbs up,” Vaishnaw said at the Nasscom Technology Leadership Forum (NTLF) 2023.
In November 2022, the government published the Draft Digital Personal Data Protection. The revised bill focuses only on personal data, thereby doing away with regulating the use of non-personal data.
The draft bill requires a data fiduciary – i.e, an entity that processes user data — to give an itemised notice to users on data sought to be collected in clear and plain language. It also mandates that the user should be allowed the right to give, manage, and withdraw consent from sharing information.
The bill also states that the data fiduciary shall not undertake tracking or behavioural monitoring of children or advertising directed at children. The bill mandates penalties of upto Rs 500 crore for non-compliance.
This bill was necessitated due to the recent withdrawal of the PDP Bill, which had garnered a lot of criticism since its first draft was formulated by the Justice BN Srikrishna Committee in 2018.