IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to meet industry on DPDP Rules on January 14: Sources

The draft DPDP Rules was released for consultation more than a year after the passage of the DPDP Act in the Parliament

Minister for Electronics  and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw is scheduled to meet industry in a consultation meeting that the government has called on the draft Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules on January 14, four sources aware of the matter said.

Vaishnaw will deliver the keynote address for the meeting scheduled to be held on January 14 morning. Minister of state for electronics and information technology Jitin Prasada is also expected to attend and will set the context of the discussion, sources aid.

Among the invitees include lawyers, industry associations, major companies and so on. The session largely aims to provide an overview of the draft rules.

The draft DPDP Rules were released for consultation on January 3, and the government is seeking stakeholder feedback on the draft till February 18.

The much awaited regulations bring in additional provisions that complement the parent DPDP Act, passed in the Parliament in August 2023.

Key provisions in the rules and (as well as) key points of discussion during the consultation meeting are expected to be around provisions surrounding restrictions on data transfer to other countries, processing of children's data, obligations for significant data fiduciaries (SDF) and so on.

Recently, Vaishnaw, during an interaction with media, assured that privacy will remain central to the rules, saying that virtual tokens used for verifying children's data will be temporary and automatically deleted after a single use.

“The tokens will be temporary and limited to one transaction after which it will be destroyed automatically,” Vaishnaw said while addressing reporters.

Under the draft rules, children under 18 will require the verifiable consent of parents or guardians before accessing social media platforms. The rules allow verification using government-issued IDs or digital tokens.