Parliament winter session: Panel seeks more time to prepare report on Data Protection Bill
BJP parliamentarian PP Chaudhary will move a motion on Wednesday to extend the deadline to submit the report on the data protection bill by the last week of the winter session.
BJP parliamentarian PP Chaudhary, who is the chairperson of the joint parliamentary committee set up in 2019 to review the country’s first data protection law, will move a motion on Wednesday to extend the deadline to submit the report on the bill by the last week of the winter session.
“That this House do extend upto the last week of the Winter Session of Parliament, 2021, the time for presentation of the Report of the Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019,” states the list of business of Parliament referring to the motion moved by Chaudhary and his party colleague Kirit Solanki.
The panel was given an extension until the first week of the winter session to table its report. The JPC has suggested stricter compliance requirements for companies; added or tweaked clauses that provide for lighter obligations on government agencies; and recommended a greater say for the state in the legal mechanism that will be set up to safeguard personal and non-personal data.
The JPC was set up in 2019 to take up the personal data protection bill after parliamentarians were divided over several provisions of a law that is meant to put a legal shape to the Right to Privacy after it was made a fundamental right by the Supreme Court in 2017, and will have far-reaching impact on industry.
“Sufficient safeguards have been provided in the bill to ensure that data is only accessed through a fair and proportionate procedure,” Chaudhary, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament representing Pali in Rajasthan said in an interview on 26 November. He added that the only exemptions are the ones already provided for in the Constitution while referring to the contentious Clause 35 of the bill, which deals with exemptions for government agencies.
The report will be tabled in Parliament following which the government will re-introduce the bill – the recommendations of parliamentary committees are not binding.
There has been push back from several opposition party members of the panel, who have argued that the new bill gives “unbridled power” to the government. At least five have already submitted their dissent notes.
According to people familiar with the contents of the report, the panel has suggested new provisions that will bake in additional compliances: companies will need to report a data breach within 72 hours, mandatorily disclose to the data principal if information relating to them is passed on to someone else, and appoint senior management personnel as data protection officers who will ultimately be held responsible.
At the same time, the rule about mandatory disclosure to the owner of a data in case it is passed on to a third entity will not apply in case it is for purposes such as State function (such as for offering benefits, to maintain law and order) or to comply with a court order. Government departments will be allowed to carry out an in-house inquiry to fix responsibility in the event of a leak, one person aware of the suggestions said.
