Draft bill for Digital India Act will be open for consultation starting June 7: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Rajeev Chandrasekhar

The draft bill for the long-awaited Digital India Act (DIA) will be released in the first week of June and will be up for consultation by June 7, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Rajeev Chandrasekhar told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of a pre-draft consultation conference in Mumbai.

“The DIA bill’s consultation on the draft will start on June 7,” Chandrasekhar said.

The Digital India Act is expected to replace the Information Technology Act, 2000, taking in to consideration the need to regulate and safeguard users in the burgeoning internet economy in India.

This was second such consultation after the first pre-consultation in Bengaluru in March. The event in Mumbai had legal experts, think tanks and major corporates including big tech firms like Meta in attendance.

Another consultation is expected in Delhi soon, ahead of the release of the draft bill in June.

The government aims to enable the digital economy in India to cross $1 trillion by 2025-26.

Syncing with the global norms

Not just focused on India, the government is also taking into consideration the discussions and actions being taken globally to regulate the growing digital economy to protect users and avoid market monopoly by technology giants.

"All the regulators in the world want to regulate through the prism of user harm. Countries of the world must harmonise and cooperate because victims are in one jurisdiction and the perpetrators are in some other jurisdiction," he said during his address.

Chandrasekhar added, "The DIA will be increasingly harmonized with other global rules and regulations on this."

Referring to the European Union's imposition of a record fine of 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) on Meta on May 22, for violating Global Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) on cross-border data transfers, Chandrasekhar highlighted that the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 has similar measures.

“That is in the DPDP bill. You will see when the Parliament passes it. We have the same kind of punitive measures there as well. The Digital Data Protection Bill is going to the Parliament in July,” he told Moneycontrol.

Intermediaries may lose safe harbour

In India, the government is looking to do away the Section 79 provision under the IT Act, 2000 entirely, which provides immunity to intermediaries platforms from not getting prosecuted for hosting third party content that spreads disinformation, hate speech, religious incitement etc.

Chandrasekhar also said that the government is deliberating to step aside from intervening between the intermediary platforms and users; instead creating an adjudicatory mechanism to resolve issues faster.

“The model of the government being in between the dispute of the user of a platform and the platform, can be replaced with the government stepping aside and saying this is the issue between the two of you. We can create an adjudicatory mechanism for those disputes, which will be fast, rapid and transparent but not have the government in the middle,” he said.