According to reports, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is doubling down on the Personal Data Protection Bill and overhauling the IT Act, 2000 for the next phase of growth.
MeitY's Additional Secretary Rajendra Kumar in an interview said, "We assess that the data economy will be the foundation of the future growth of the IT sector. That is why we need to streamline the legal framework for data handling and bring our IT laws on par with the latest international concepts in the IT space. The PDP Bill will help the IT sector in India to get more business from abroad because we would have a legal system in place for data handling, which is now being seen as a critical requirement by many countries.”
The government departments had developed the e-Office application that automates the entire functioning of the government offices by enabling end-to-end processing of office files electronically. This application served the requirements of the government during the times of lockdown when people were not able to come to the office physically.
Also, the entire communications infrastructure, including the internet and the telecom networks, functioned without any hiccup, which enabled different sectors, including banking and e-commerce firms, to continue their services.
The entire efforts to improve the state's IT domain capabilities started more than a decade ago. MeitY made efforts to recruit the state e-mission teams (SeMT) and place them in all the states, which has helped make this entire movement towards tech capacity building a very effective one. Today, we are seeing that many states have formed their teams at the state level who are now spearheading major e-governance programmes and important projects.
Data economy and data governance are a vital part of the emerging digital economy. Rajendra Kumar assesses that the data economy will be the foundation of the future growth of the entire IT sector - not only for the mainstream IT sector but also for almost all the other domains in the economy.
To ensure that they have a very sustainable data economy and a data governance regime, the legal framework that we have envisaged in the form of the Personal Data Protection Bill, now in the parliament at an advanced stage of consideration, is going to be a key pillar of digital trust.
With the PDP bill coming into effect, Rajendra Kumar believes that they would have the world's most advanced and most contemporaneous data governance regime in India, which would provide a framework to IT businesses and government departments to handle the personal data of citizens in a much more responsible way.
