Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh on July 25 said the Centre withdrew the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2019 from Parliament on Monday to avoid incorporating “elaborate safeguards” recommended by a parliamentary committee.
The Bill aimed to regulate the use of DNA profiling particularly for criminal offences. It also sought to establish a DNA data bank at the national level, with regional centres, to “store and maintain” DNA profiles, and a DNA regulatory board that would advise the Centre and the State governments on issues surrounding the use of DNA in laboratories.
Civil society organisations and MPs had raised privacy concerns, following which the Bill was sent to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology for analysis. Mr. Ramesh is the Chairman of the committee
The Department of Biotechnology, which drafted the Bill which was sent to the Cabinet for approval, has maintained that DNA profiles from all living individuals would be stored only after obtaining informed consent.
As per the now-withdrawn Bill, the DNA profiles to be stored were not for an entire population but for specified categories of individuals such as convicts, suspects of major crimes, and relatives of missing persons. The information to be stored in the DNA data bank would not reveal any of the traits (race, caste, facial features, and so on) of an individual. There were provisions in the Bill to remove the DNA profiles once the case was resolved. There were stringent safeguards, including penal provisions, to ensure that the DNA data bank information was accessed and used for defined purposes, and only so with appropriate authorisation.
However, in a statement explaining why the Bill was being withdrawn, the Science Ministry on Monday said that most of the clauses of the DNA Technology Bill was covered in The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 and that DNA testing was now the universally accepted as the “gold standard of forensic investigation”.
“Actually the real reason is that the Modi government did not want the elaborate safeguards recommended by the Standing Committee and decided to just ignore it after having pressed for early submission of the report,” Mr. Ramesh tweeted.
In January, 2021, as part of the parliamentary committee’s deliberations, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen president Asaddudin Owaisi and CPI leader Binoy Viswam filed dissent notes to the committee’s report on the Bill on the grounds that it did not consider concerns over privacy violations and targeted Dalits, Muslims, and Adivasis by way of DNA sample collection and indefinite storage of genetic information.
Mr. Ramesh had then differed with Mr. Owaisi’s argument on possible privacy violations by the Bill and pointed out that even eminent jurists were divided on the issue. More safeguards should be added, he said “as we gain further experience with the use of technology”.
The committee, in its report, said that while it supported the Bill’s attempt to create an ecosystem that benefited from scientific evidence like DNA, and thus aiding the legal system “...widespread and extensive training was of paramount importance”.
It suggested several modifications, additions and deletions to clauses in the Bill, including restricting the use of the Bill only to judicial matters, doing away with the ‘regional data banks’, and specifying that the proposed DNA regulatory board would be independent and professional and not have a Secretary to the Government of India as the Chairperson.
