Modi government is drafting new privacy bill, says IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that the Modi government has started drafting a new comprehensive privacy bill. Highlighting that the law's public release is "very close", Vaishnaw said it is in well-advanced stages.

After big technology companies such as Facebook and Google raised alarm about it, India's government on Wednesday withdrew a data protection and privacy bill which was first proposed in 2019.

As a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stricter regulation of tech giants, the law had proposed stringent regulations on cross-border data flows and proposed giving the Indian government powers to seek user data from companies.

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Leading to the need for a new "comprehensive legal framework", the decision came as a parliamentary panel's review of the 2019 bill suggested many amendments as per a government notice.

Vaishnaw told news agency Reuters that the government aims to get the new bill approved and made into law by early 2023 in the parliament's budget session which usually runs January-February.

The parliamentary panel that reviewed the old bill had already gathered industry feedback due to which the process "won’t be that long" according to Vaishnaw.

Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar tweeted “Privacy is a fundamental right of Indian citizens & a Trillion-dollar Digital Economy requires Global std Cyber laws.”

Opposition parties had opposed the proposed restrictions on the use of personal data without the explicit consent of citizens in the withdrawn bill.