A committee headed by retired Supreme Court justice B.N. Srikrishna on Friday submitted a report on data protection and a draft of a proposed Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, to Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad.
The committee was constituted by the Narendra Modi government in July last year to deliberate on a data protection framework law.
Prasad said the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, submitted by the Justice Srikrishna Committee, will be a milestone in the larger narrative of digital development.
While addressing a press conference, Prasad said, "India proactively took a bold step on the issue of net neutrality and firmly upheld that right of internet access is not negotiable. Today's report of the Justice Srikrishna Committee will be a milestone in the larger narrative of digital development."
Prasad further said the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 should be a blend of security, safety, privacy and innovation and a model for the whole world.
"The Centre will take stakeholder comments along with taking cabinet approval before finalising the legislation. Being a very monumental law, the government will like to have the widest parliamentary consultation possible," Prasad added.
On the other hand, justice Srikrishna said the interests of the citizens and the responsibilities of the state have to be protected, but not at the cost of trade and industry.
"We held meetings with stakeholders at major IT hubs of India. We also put out a white paper on the subject after looking at the laws world over and raising a number of issues. We discussed all these issues and prepared this report," Srikrishna added.
Justice Srikrishna further said the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, has been prepared through an open process where the members of the committee consulted all stakeholders.
He also highlighted the need for efforts to protect privacy as it is an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty, as data is not a matter of property, but a matter of trust.
"We leave our footprint everywhere, we leave our data everywhere. Somebody is making money out of it. So let's control it and make sure that the country is empowered and the citizen is empowered. We have dealt with the issue of consent. We have gone into the extent to which the state can intrude into the privacy of citizens. We have also looked into concepts like the right to recall data and data portability," Srikrishna said.
Justice Srikrishna noted that a threefold approach was taken with regards to the location where data should be stored.
"In this report, we have left it to the sectoral regulator to identify the critical data relating to their respective sectors," Srikrishna added.
While industry groups welcomed the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, privacy rights activists voiced concerns over some of its provisions.
In its reaction on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, the Save Our Privacy initiative argued the draft bill had several exceptions to the processing of data by the government and alleged this was an attempt to dilute the rights of citizens. It also pointed the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 did not devote attention to need to reform surveillance laws in India.