We are proud to announce that the Kautilya Society, NUJS submitted its Report on the revised draft of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 to the Joint Parliamentary Committee. The Joint Parliamentary Committee, chaired by Ms. Meenakshi Lekhi, invited comments from stakeholders concerned, deadlined 25 February, 2020 as reported. The Report was prepared by Prof. Agnidipto Tarafder (Faculty Advisor), Siddharth Sonkar (Student Coordinator), Rohit Gupta, Asees Kaur, Akshay Luhadia and Swarna Sengupta.
The Kautilya Society is a collaboration between students at NUJS and Vidhi, Centre for Legal Policy. The Society endeavours to increase student participation in legislative processes towards the making of better laws.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee may exercise its discretion in allowing them to appear before the Committee in person. The Report includes several suggestions including suitable amendments and modifications to the existing document. The suggestions include among others:
1) Inclusion of definition of surveillance (which constitutes ‘harm’ under the Bill’),
2)Decentralisation of the power to notify critical personal data and inclusion of guiding principles in the Bill to notify critical personal data
3) Removal of the requirement to provide valid reason to revoke consent,
4) Exclusion of anonymised personal data from the scope of section 91 which allows the acquisition of non-personal data,
5) Increasing independence of consent managers envisaged in the Bill and
6) Vision for future data literacy, i.e. initiatives towards empowering individuals towards exercising greater control over their data.
The Comments can be accessed here
We at NUJS hope that the Report is able to successfully influence members of the Committee introducing the suggested changes to the Bill before it is finalised.
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