DPDP Bill has not been referred to any committee: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the Digital Personal Data Protection bill has not been referred to any committee, and it can only be done after its introduction in the Parliament.

Chandrasekhar's comments was in response to Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas, who had written to Lok Sabha speaker and Rajya Sabha chairperson on July 28 to not allow the tabling of a report prepared by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT.

Curiously, Chandrasekhar also accused Brittas, who is also a member of the committee, of spreading misinformation on the bill being "adopted" by the committee.

A few days back, Brittas along with other Opposition MPs in the IT committee staged a walkout from its meeting after the Shiv Sena MP Jadhav Prataprao Ganpatrao-headed committee "adopted" a report endorsing the bill.

The members who had opposed the report had said that the modified version of the DPDP bill, which had been cleared by the Union Cabinet, was not made available to them, and was thus not privy to the formation of any report.

In the report, which Moneycontrol has reviewed, the committee called for the immediate enactment of the DPDP Bill into a law.

Chandrasekhar in the tweet said, "No bill including the proposed DPDP (Digital Personal Data Protection Bill) can be referred to any committee unless it is done so by Parliament. In turn, the bill can be only referred to committee AFTER the Cabinet-approved bill is introduced in Parliament. DPDP has not been introduced into Parliament AND so question of considering it in committee doesn't arise."

On the other hand, earlier, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw had courted controversy after he claimed, in an event, that the IT Committee had "approved" the bill. Committee members such as Karti Chidambaram, Jawhar Sircar, and Brittas had labelled the minister's claims as "untrue".