Digital Personal Data Protection Bill passed in Rajya Sabha
The bill has been made technology agnostic so that evolving data concepts can be included without amendments
The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 was passed on Wednesday in the Rajya Sabha of Indian parliament. This act will now become the first law to protect citizen’s personal data.
The bill has been made technology agnostic such that data concepts that are still evolving can be included without requiring amendments, said the Communications and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
The Bill addresses two key long-standing demands of the tech industry– allowing relaxations around the age of consent for children, and significantly easing cross-border data flows.
It seeks to ease data storage, processing and transfer norms for government and private companies including BigTech firms as well as local firms seeking growth abroad. Once it becomes law, it will ease data flows and reduce compliance burdens for tech giants like Google and Meta which have stored the personal data of millions of Indians. It allows companies to export data to any country except those specified by the government.
Vaishnaw had introduced the bill in the lower house on August 3. It was then demanded that the bill should be sent to the standing committee for scrutiny.
The minister said that the bill will not override any law that provides for a higher degree of protection for or restriction on transfer of personal data by an entity.
