Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft want one more shot at convincing India before data protection bill reaches Parliament

• Global tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Abode feel that there should be another round of discussions before India’s Personal Data Protection Bill is brought to Parliament.
• Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT minister, on the other hand, wants the Personal Data Protection to be tabled in Parliament as soon as possible.
• Global tech companies with the BSA, the software alliance, say another round of consultations will help account for the bill’s many changes and learn from the GDPR as it completes its first year.

The Indian government is pushing for a Personal Data Protection Bill in the parliament as soon as possible but global tech giants want another round of consultation before the bill’s implementation.

“Given how the privacy discourse and policy discourse has happened in the last year and also technology has rapidly change. We urge the government to undertake further consultation before they introduce it into the parliament,” Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, the Country Manager for BSA India told Business Insider India.

BSA, the software alliance that includes companies like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Intel, Adobe, Akamai, Oracle, IBM and Apple, feel that since the policy that will now be tabled is considerably different from what was originally presented for discussion — another round of inputs would help the companies as well as the Indian government.

Rushing to parliament

Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT and telecom minister, told the press that taking the Personal Data Protection Bill to parliament will be one of his top priorities during the first 100 days of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term.

“In IT, we will try to quickly get the data protection bill to the Parliament and also, notifying the intermediary guidelines,” he said.

Before India started out on its journey to address data privacy concerns, the debate had already been ongoing in the US for nearly 20 years and in the EU for over 10 years.

The original draft of the Personal Data Protection Bill that was shared in 2018 draws its inspiration from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as well as other legislations around the world.

And, given that GDPR has just completed its first year of implementation, Krishnamoorthy feels that there’s a lot that India can learn from the EU’s experience, “It would be beneficial for the government given that GDPR has gone through its anniversary and there were learnings from that. And generally, also there’s been a lot of activity as well, like the G20 Summit in Japan. ”

It’s not just that India needs to look at the experience of other countries. The new draft that will be tabled at parliament is considerably different from what was originally presented. “The next version be more robust than what it is currently,” Krishnamoorthy explains.

He adds, “It’s a step in the right direction because the time of privacy legislation has come. It’s been a pretty thorough effort trying to come with a comprehensive data protection legislation on the government’s part.”

There were many concerns in the first bill with respect to the definitions of data and the mandate of data localisation. BSA is hoping that the final version will have rules that are horizontally applicable.

See also:
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