Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar was responding to a question in the Lok Sabha by Congress MP Manish Tewari on the subject.
Chandrasekhar said the draft was open for public consultation.
“This policy doesn’t envisage any sale of data or incentive for data collection. The objective of the draft policy is not commercialization,” he said in a written response.
Tewari, who was also a member of the Joint Committee of Parliament studying the Data Protection Bill, 2019, also sought to know whether the government was aware that holding of consultations and deliberations on the Bill was causing an inordinate delay in its introduction despite the JCP tabling its final report on the proposed legislation.
In response, Chandrasekhar said there “have been no deliberations and consultations on the report of JCP.”
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The JCP tabled its report before Parliament in December. “The report comprises 93 recommendations including a Bill which is under examination,” he said.
ET reported previously that the
government may draft a completely new privacy Bill by putting aside the current version, which has been in the making for nearly five years and does not comprehensively address the requirements of the country’s changing technology landscape.
The government has since clarified that it does not want to “rush” any legislation that may hurt India’s growing start-up ecosystem.
The government’s draft policy on data accessibility and use had stoked concern among industry members and activists who feared it would
trigger increased privacy risksin the absence of regulatory cover for personal data in the country, ET reported last month.
Industry is also seeking clarity of terms like high-value data set, anonymised data along with a phased implementation plan.
Terming the objectives, data sharing and governance principles as “prima facie valuable”, IT industry association Nasscom said they are “broadly worded and are not articulated as quantifiable outcomes against which future performance can be measured.”
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a draft of the India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 for public consultation in February.
The government, which is seeking to better utilise the voluminous data that it collects to provide better delivery of public services, had invited comments on the policy until March 18.
The policy proposes that all central and state government bodies compulsorily share data with each other to create a common “searchable database”.
While minimally processed data sets shall be made freely available, detailed data sets that have undergone value addition, transformation and qualify for monetisation may be priced appropriately, it said.
Digital think tank Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) had said that with the Data Protection Act not being implemented yet, the selling of data was a “dubious” thing to do.
SFLC said that since there were no security safeguards for anonymisation and the task had been delegated to the respective ministries, this would leave room for states to decide the standards for themselves.
The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) said the primary objectives were undergirded by “perverse economic incentives”. It also said that the cursory changes made to the draft Data Access Policy fail to recognise fundamental issues.
In an interview to ET in March, Infosys cofounder and non-personal data (NPD) committee head S (Kris) Gopalakrishnan said India needed to allow for the commercialisation of data, and the open data policy of the government which recommends monetisation of data, should be encouraged.
“As long as citizens’ data privacy is protected and citizens receive better services in future, we need to allow for commercialisation,” Gopalakrishnan said. “This is sort of like travelling in a private car and public transportation — we share our private space for better economics.”
Gopalakrishnan said that private and public interests must be balanced.
While there was a need to bolster economic activity around data, he said it was equally important to listen to concerns and address these or explain why certain decisions were made.
