Data Protection Bill: Regulations like GDPR in EU give far more exemptions, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw on August 7 addressed the criticisms against the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill, specifically in relation to the exemptions given to the government, by stating that similar regulations across the world like in European Union, offer far more exemptions.

Speaking in the Parliament while moving for the data protection bill to be passed in the Lok Sabha, Vaishnaw said: "If there is a natural disaster somewhere, should the authority then be then giving data notices or taking consent, or should they be safeguarding lives? If the police has to catch a criminal, should the police care about writing forms or catching the criminal?"

Vaishnaw said that when compared to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), where the legislation gives 16 exemptions, the DPDP Bill gives only four exemptions.

This statement comes after a lot of criticism has been levied on the bill's provision that gives the government power to exempt its agencies from its provisions. Opposition MPs had criticised this provision earlier when the bill was tabled in the Parliament on August 3.

While speaking on this in the the Parliament, the minister slammed the Opposition accusing it to not care about "people's interest".

"For quite a few years, various committees, Joint Parliamentary Committee have deliberated on this legislation. Based on these deliberations we have brought this legislation."

"It would have been good if the opposition engaged in healthy debate. But opposition MPs do not care about citizen's rights. That is why they are just sloganeering and they are not interested in debates."

Vaishnaw said that extensive consultation was taken up around the bill, with involvement of around 38 organisations, 39 ministries, 24,000 stakeholder comments.

He sad that the bill has used the pronoun "she"  as  a measure of "women's empowerment" in the country. Apart from that, he informed that the bill mandates that platforms to give notice to users for taking their data in 24 Indian languages.

"The DPDP Bill has inculcated several provisions for data protection. Firstly, principle of legality where if any platform takes any data, it mandates that the data should be taking legally. Secondly, principle of purpose limitation mandates that the data should only be taken for the purpose that is mentioned...," Vaishnaw said adding that the other principles include, that of data minimalisation, principle of accuracy, storage limitation and reasonable safeguard.