The new draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 as to be tabled in the Parliament has been released by the Standing Committee on IT headed by Shiv sena MP Mr Prataprao Jhadav.
A Copy of the bill is available here
According to the report in ET, several opposition MPs walked out of the meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on IT that adopted the report. Seven MPs including Congress’s Karti Chidambaram, TMC’s Mahua Moitra and Jawahar Sircar, CPI’s John Brittas and TDP’s Jayadev Galla opposed the draft. The objections which appear to be adhoc were on the provisions of the Data Protection Board and the RTI.
The provision on RTI has been discussed earlier. The changes that has been brought on the Data Protection Board are more in accordance with the earlier draft PDPB2019/DPA2021 and are an improvement over the interim draft of DPDPB 2022.
The more controversial Section 17 (Cross Border Transfer) and Section 18 (Exemptions/Legitimate interest) has been modified. Some changes in the “Deemed Consent” provision are also observed.
It is observed that the restrictions of any on the cross border transfer of data will be notified later. In the meantime any existing provisions of the law which could be stricter will remain in force. It is not clear if the RBI’s data localization notification can be considered as a law in this regard.
The full impact of the changes will be discussed in these columns subsequently.
We welcome the introduction of this version of the Bill and hope it will get passed soon.
Naavi
RBI’s orders or for that reason any other law/ rules/ regulations requiring stricter data localisation requirements for specific data sets being governed by them, will prevail over the general cross border data flow as mandated in the proposed bill.