Data protection bill, Digital India Act will cause 'behavioural changes' in platforms: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill and the upcoming Digital India Act will cause "behavioural changes" in how platforms interact with consumers and citizens, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said during the inaugural edition of Moneycontrol's India Fintech Conclave (IFC) in Mumbai.

"This (DPDP and Digital India Act) will, certainly there will be behavioural changes, there will be changes in the way platforms interact with consumers and citizens," he said.

"The days where personal data can be harvested, algorithms can be built on top of that -- that will certainly change. The days that anonymised personal data will be stored for many years and learning models be created on top of that, will also certainly, will have to be replaced by something that is more instantaneous in terms of learning and storing," Chandrasekhar said in his special address at the IFC 2023.

"There will be incremental changes, it will not be business as usual," he added.

DPDP Bill

Following the withdrawal of the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019, the government came out with the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill last year. The revised bill focuses only on personal data, thereby doing away with regulating the use of non-personal data.

Chandrasekhar said that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will be taking the DPDP Bill "into government" soon. He explained, that the government does not want to create any "hiccup to the innovation ecosystem" with this bill.

"Citizens' rights will be protected, and the exceptional circumstances under which the government has to have access to personal data under emergency situations will also be permitted," he said, adding that the drafting of the bill, was very simple.

"We consulted over 90 days, each of those consultations were led and managed by me," he added.

Digital India Act

The ministry is also set to begin the consultation of the Digital India Bill, the much-awaited successor to the decades-old Information Technology Act 2000.

"The consultation (on Digital India bill) is starting later this week. It is a successor to the IT Act. It is a global standard, contemporaneous legislation that addresses the future of internet, addresses the future of tech innovation ecosystem, addresses issues of user harm, openness accountability," he said.

Chandrasekhar said that the bill will define various types of intermediaries. "Today the diversity of intermediaries, the complexity and the difference between intermediaries, require different types of regulation and different types of rulemaking," he said, adding that the bill will only be enacted after undertaking a consultation process.

While responding to a query on whether the Digital India Act will introduce a regulator akin to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Chandrasekhar said that the subject will be discussed with stakeholders.

"The internet was a force of good in the early days. We also know that it is about CSAM, misinformation, cyber crimes. So the harm part of internet must be squarely addressed -- whether the model is a regulator or is it just certain punitive penalties that is built in based on somebody's determination whether user harm has happened or not, that is something that we will design and talk through with stakeholders," he explained.

Dataset program

Chandrasekhar also said that the government will launch the India AI Program by the end of March or early April. He described it as the "largest publicly assembled dataset in the world".

"So the India AI ecosystem working with the fintech ecosystem or any other ecosystem will certainly catapult the next generation of fintech or other parts of the internet," he said.