A Free and Fair Digital Economy: Protecting Privacy, Empowering Indians

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, government of India, constituted a Committee of Experts under the Chairmanship of Justice B. N. Srikrishna on July 31, 2017. Its purpose was to identify the main data protection issues in India and recommend measures to address these issues.The committee submitted this report to the ministry on July 27, 2018, along with a draft bill on personal data protection (this is different from the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, which Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister for Electronics and Information Technology, introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 11, 2019). The report proposes a framework for a personal data protection law “…that protects individual privacy, ensures autonomy [of personal data], allows data flows for a growing data ecosystem and creates a free and fair digital economy.”The report begins with an introduction (Chapter 1). The other chapters cover: the scope and applicability of a data protection law (Chapter 2); processing of personal data (Chapter 3); obligations of ‘data fiduciaries’ or entities that process personal data (Chapter 4); the rights of ‘data principals’ or individuals who possess their own personal data (Chapters 5); the flow of data across borders (Chapter 6); the impact of a data protection law on other legislations (Chapter 7); issues of consent for processing personal data (Chapter 8); and the enforcement of a data protection law (Chapter 9).