The story so far:
The journey towards a data protection legislation can be traced back to 2017 when an expert committee was constituted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY). The major development came in December 2021 when the Data Protection Bill, 2021 (DPB, 2021) was released. However, it was withdrawn in Parliament by Minister for Communications and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw on August 3, 2022. On November 18, 2022, a draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 (DPDPB, 2022) was released for public consultation. The submissions made under this consultation process were not made public. The request to publicly release the submissions was also denied in a Right to Information application. One year on, the 2023 Bill has been tabled in Parliament without clarifying how and on what basis these changes were incorporated.
