Naavi.org

With the new cabinet of Modi 3.0 announced, it is heartening to note that Mr Ashwini Vashnav continues to be the minister for IT along with Railways and Information and Broadcasting. Digital publishing being a major part of Meity’s regulations, it is good that I&B ministry has been combined with MeitY at the level of the minister.

The MOS of IT Mr Rajev Chandrashekar unfortunately lost his election narrowly in Tiruvananthapuram against Mr Shashi Tharoor and will be missed for continuity. With his personal IT knowledge, he had brought his own welcome style of operations in the MeitY and worked hard on the DPDPA as well as the amendment of ITA 2000 through Digital India Act. He will be missed by the industry.

We wish Rajeev Chandrashekar all the best in his next stint as a party worker either in Kerala or in Bangalore which he represented in the Rajya Sabha.

In place of Mr Mr Rajeev Chandrashekar, we have now Mr Jitin Prasada as the new minister of state for IT.

A product of Doon School Dehradun and an MBA from International Management institute in New Delhi, Jitin Prasada recently served as a Minister in the UP state Government as Minister of Technical Education for 2 years. We hope under the guidance of Mr Ashwin Vaishnaw, he would be continuing from where Mr Rajeev Chandrashekar left off.

We had heard that in the 100 day agenda, passing of the rules of DPDPA was one of the items included and we look forward to Mr Jitin Prasada to ensure that the draft rules are released quickly and initiate the public debate. We also hope that he will not succumb to the lobbying of the industry which is interested in delaying the rules and manipulating it to their advantage.

Though Mr Jitin Prasada comes from the background of Congress, we presume that if Mr Modi has chosen him for the job, he must be committed enough to take the Indian IT forward. Apart from the task of constituting the DPB, releasing the draft rules on DPDPA, Mr Jitin Prasada has the responsibility of defending the Digital Media Intermediary rules under ITA 2000 which is under challenge in the Supreme Court by Meta/WhatsApp.

In the past we have found that the MeitY has not effectively defended cases against itself from the multinational Big Tech industry since this industry is also supported by the NASSCOM. There is a need to change this attitude and enable the opposition to have its way when it comes to tightening the laws against “Fake News Industry”.

Laws and regulations related to the AI industry is another major step required from the Meity and the earlier regime had been pursuing the revision of ITA 2000 with a replacement act like Digital India Act. There was a fight between Meity and Ministry of Finance on the Bit Coin regulation which also was kept pending due to corruption at all places and possibly including the Judiciary.

Now, if Mr Jitin Prasada pursues the DIT dream, he should ensure that the law is made for the people and not for the benefit of the Bit-Coin industry and the Fake news industry.

There is also a need for taking action on Cyber Crime prevention and ensuring that the existing ITA 2000 is itself used to strengthen the mechanism with better training of the “Adjudicators” who are administratively close to the MeitY. With the passage of DPDPA, we expect that the compensation payable to Data Principals under DPDPA needs to be handled by the Adjudicators of IT and they need to be trained on DPDPA quickly. Even after 24 years of ITA 2000, the performance of IT Secretaries as Adjudicators have been below expectations and this needs to be corrected.

The opportunities before MeitY are plenty and we wish Mr Jitin Prasada success in his new stint.

Naavi

BSPIN and FDPPI has jointly organized an online Fire Chat discussion today at 10.00 am on DPDPA 2023 and ITA 2000.

Registration can be done here

On request, attendees will be issued participation certificate with 2 hours CPE credit. Attendees will also get a 20% discount on the book “Privacy Guardians…”

Naavi

FDPPI is pleased to announce that the flagship event of FDPPI namely IDPS 2024 has been scheduled for November 22, 23 and 24 of 2024.

The program will be virtual and live between 3.00 pm to 9.00 pm. This will cover the Indian and EU time

From 10.00 am to 1.00 pm, pre-recorded videos would be available to cover the US time.

The general theme of the seminar would be “Privacy issues in AI and Robotics, The Law, Technology and Governance”.

Details of individual sessions and speakers are being finalized.

Request all professionals to mark the dates in their calendars.

Any corporate which wants to participate in the conference as sponsor or virtual exhibitor of their products may contact FDPPI.

Naavi

In a bold move of huge significance, OLA has announced that it will be moving its Rs 100 crore cloud business from Microsoft Azure to its own platform “Krutrim”.

Additionally OLA offers one year free cloud usage for any body else who want to shift from Azure to Krutrim.

Interested companies can contact exitazure@olakrutrim.com

The reason cited by Mr Bhavish Agarwal, CEO states that Microsoft AI on Linked In is trying to impose its political ideology on its users.

We appreciate the stand taken by OLA and urge other companies to explore and support the OLA initiative of avoiding dependence on Azure for their Cloud requirements.

We welcome comments from Cloud Experts .

Naavi

Refer:

Times of India: We dont need lectures from western companies..

https://chat.olakrutrim.com/home

Detailed post of Mr Bhavish Agarwal on the issue on his X account is reproduced here:

As an Indian institution, Ola is for genuine actions on diversity. We run one of the largest women only automotive plants. ot 1 out of 10 lines, or a small section, but the whole plant! Almost 5000 women now and will grow to tens of thousands in the coming years. And regarding gender inclusivity, we don’t need lectures from western companies on how to be inclusive. Our culture didn’t need pronouns to be inclusive for thousands of years. On a personal note, I had visited Ayodhya last year and learnt about how transgenders had been accorded special respect in our culture from ancient times! Here’s a short video from our national broadcaster DD on this – https://youtube.com/watch?v=goDQFIAZtt8…. On the other hand, the pronouns issue I wrote about is a woke political ideology of entitlement which doesn’t belong in India. I wouldn’t have waded into this debate but clearly Linkedin has presumed Indians need to have pronouns in our life, and that we can’t criticise it. They will bully us into agreeing with them or cancel us out. And if they can do this to me, I’m sure the average user stands no chance. As a founder and CEO, this western DEI system has a major impact on my business as it grows an entitlement mindset in our professional lives and I will fight it. This situation brings me to the need for us to build our own Indian tech platforms. I’m not against global tech companies. But as an Indian citizen, I feel concerned that my life will be governed by western Big Tech monopolies and we will be culturally subsumed as the above experience shows. This is not about Ola or any of my companies. Ola is too small to make any impact against this. I want to confront this forced ideology as a free thinking Indian and do what I can in my capacity. So here are the actions I’m taking. Putting my money where my mouth is. ⁃While we can’t do anything about Linkedin’s monopoly overnight, I’m making a commitment to work with the Indian developer community to build a DPI social media framework. DPIs like UPI, ONDC, Aadhaar etc are a uniquely Indian idea and is even more needed in the world of social media. The only “community guidelines” should be the Indian law. No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on “community guidelines”! ⁃Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we’ve decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own@Krutrim cloud within the next week. It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this. ⁃Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that! Mail us on exitazure@olakrutrim.com. Offer is perpetually open!

At a time India is debating the rules on DPDPA 023, an interesting controversy has arisen between RBI and the EU authorities regarding security trading by EU Banks in India.

Four EU banks namely, Credit Agricole, Societe Generale, Deutsche Bank, and BNP Paribas have sought RBI and ESMA (European Securities and Market Authority) to resolve the differences. The point of controversy is that ESMA wants a right to audit CCIL (Clearing Corporation of India) in order to allow the EU Banks invest in Indian securities through CCIL.

The Government of India has categorically refused any right to the EU authorities to exercise their jurisdiction on Indian organizations which are governed by the Indian regulatory agencies like RBI and SEBI. Way back in 2022 ESMA de-recognized the CCIL and in October 2024, these Banks need to stop investing through CCIL.

It is unlikely that Government of India is likely to yield to the request of ESMA even now.

According to the report in Business Standard the concerns revolve around client confidentiality, in the context of third-party clearing, especially for custodian banks tasked with holding securities on behalf of other financial entities.

Banks have now sought an extension of at least 6 months from their national regulators to provide extension of the current deadline.

It is stated that he challenge lies in reconciling client confidentiality requirements when clearing through a third-party bank instead of CCIL.

However, DPDPA 2023 provides for processing of data on a pseudonymisation basis which can be used to contain the risk of confidentiality with the Banks and not transfer it to the celaring agency. The clients are not Indians and hence the data belongs to non-Indians. Such data processing can also be notified as outside the scope of DPDPA 2023 through a notification.

Hence the issue is simple to resolve and if the Banks and RBI take into account the provisions of DPDPA 2023, there should be no reason to extend the controversy.

For the same reason, there is no reason for RBI to agree to the demand of ESMA to exercise audit rights on Indian organizations. This needs to be made clear to EU.

Naavi

Yesterday, Future Crime Research Foundation of Bangalore had organized a virtual conference on the topic “Is India Inc prepared for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023” in which Naavi participated as a speaker.

Naavi