India’s proposed data protection regulator needs strong safeguards

Dvara Research, with the Data Security Council of India (DSCI), co-developed two privacy handbooks directed at FSPs in the insurance and banking sector. The handbooks help FSPs implement data protection in a customer-centric manner throughout the data lifecycle, including in legacy systems.

The latest iteration of India’s data protection legislation calls for a reminder of why the country needs a Personal Data Protection Bill and what would make it a good one.

Protecting citizens’ privacy is a pre-eminent mandate of any data protection regime. The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill appears to have departed farther away from that mandate

India’s Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (the Bill) was introduced in Parliament in December 2019, and is currently under consideration by a Joint Parliamentary Committee of MPs.

This paper seeks to understand the nature of harm emerging from personal data processing activities and its impact on user protection. To this end, the paper analyses how personal data-related harms are unique and distinct from other kinds of harms arising from torts, breach of contract, crime or defects in products and services.

An analysis of literature on the socio-economic implications of sharing privately held NPD and the objectives of other comparable frameworks suggests that the rationale for some of these goals are unclear. They do not take into consideration the complete economic and social merits and demerits of sharing privately held NPD.