The Personal Data Protection Bill will be introduced in the coming Winter Session of the Parliament, the central government informed the Supreme Court on Thursday, Live Law reported.
The information was provided by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta during a hearing on WhatsApp’s privacy policy 2021.
The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was withdrawn on August 3 after the Joint Committee of Parliament had recommended 81 changes and 12 “major recommendations” to it.
The Bill, which was approved by the Union Cabinet in December 2019, proposes restrictions on the use of personal information of people without their explicit consent. The items covered by the draft Bill included consent, personal data, exemptions that can be granted, storage restrictions for personal data and individual rights.
In November, several members of the parliamentary committee including Congress MPs Jairam Ramesh, Manish Tewari, Vivek Tankha and Gaurav Gogoi, Trinamool Congress legislators Derek O’Brien and Mahua Moitra and Biju Janata Dal’s Amar Patnaik, had expressed their dissent after the panel adopted its draft report on the law.
Tewari had said the Bill creates “two parallel universes” – one of the private sector and where it is applied with “full rigour” and another for the government where it is full with exceptions and escape clauses.
He had also said that the Bill failed to capture the essence…
