New Data Protection Bill to be introduced in Parliament during Monsoon Session: Centre tells Supreme Court
Satya Prakash
New Delhi, April 11
The Central Government will introduce the new Data Protection Bill in Parliament during the Monsoon Session in July, Attorney General R Venkataramani told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
“The Bill is ready. It just has to be introduced in Parliament. It will be introduced in the Monsoon session in July…It may be considered after that,” Venkataramani told a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Justice KM Joseph which was hearing petitions challenging the latest privacy policy of WhatsApp.
The new Data Protection Bill would address all the concerns raised in the petitions being heard by the court, the top law officer told the Bench, which also included Justice Ajay Rastogi, Justice Aniruddha Bose, Justice Hrishikesh Roy and Justice CT Ravikumar.
Opposing the Attorney General’s submission, senior advocate Shyam Divan urged the Bench on behalf of the petitioners not to link the ongoing hearing to ‘complex legislative process’ which could cause inordinate delay. When the matter came up for hearing for the first time, the Bench was told that the Bill would be introduced in the Winter Session but it wasn’t, Divan pointed out.
“The consultation process is a continuous process so it went through a very qualified consultation process,” Venkataramani replied.
As Justice Joseph and Justice Rastogi are due to retire in June, the Bench requested the top court’s Registry to place the matter before the Chief Justice of India for setting up a new Bench to take up the matter afresh, preferably in the first week of August 2023.
India does not have a standalone data protection law and the field is regulated under the Information Technology Act, 2000, which, many believe, doesn’t offer a proper framework to ensure protection of personal data.
While declaring right to privacy to be a Fundamental Right, the Supreme Court had on August 24, 2017 noted that informational privacy was a facet of the right to privacy and dangers to privacy in an age of information could originate from both the State and non-State actors.
The top court had asked the Centre to put into place a robust regime for data protection, saying, “The creation of such a regime requires a careful and sensitive balance between individual interests and legitimate concerns of the state.”
In 2017, the Centre constituted a Committee of Experts on Data Protection headed by Justice BN Srikrishna which submitted its report in July 2018. Based on Justice Srikrishna Committee report, the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced in Lok Sabha in December 2019. However, the Bill was withdrawn in August 2022 and in November last year the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released the Draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, inviting suggestions and feedback.
Petitioners Karmanya Singh Sareen and Shreya Sethi had challenged the contract between WhatsApp and its parent Facebook to provide access to calls, photographs, texts, videos and documents shared by users on the ground that it violated their right to privacy free speech.
As an interim order, WhatsApp was earlier directed to widely publicise its stand that its users in India don’t have to accept its 2021 privacy policy and WhatsApp’s functionality would remain unaffected till the Data Protection law became a reality.
