Medianama The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) floated a second tender in December 2022 for implementation and maintenance of a Master Data Management and de- duplication tool for a State Family Database (SFDB) project. The objective is to assign the ‘Makkal ID’— a unique identification number already allotted to the state’s seven crore residents— to different records across departments. The SFDB is projected to be the “single source of truth” of all...

-Newslaundry The Government of India has removed exemptions for journalistic work from data protection obligations in the fourth iteration of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022. If this iteration is passed as law a story containing personal data may result in journalists having to prove to a data protection board that their story was in the public interest, Newslaundry reported. The three previous versions - in 2018, 2019 and 2021...

-IndiaSpend.com Several important datasets that help in formulating government policies have not been released for over two years Mumbai: Of 20 government datasets that IndiaSpend analysed, the collection of data or its public release has been delayed for 12 datasets. Crucial data such as from the census, household expenditure and poverty estimates, which influence other data sets and policymaking, are over two years old. Political manipulation in data releases and a weakened data...

-The Telegraph The older Bill mandated monitoring, testing and certification of hardware devices by the Data Protection Authority The draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 did not consider several critical issues such as the regulation of hardware and devices and localisation of data with retrospective effect, which have been opposed by the global tech giants. Abhishek Malhotra (managing partner, TMT Law Practice) said: “The draft Bill has watered down the objective of...

-The Hindu Business Line Under-invoicing of imports is just one part of the story. Data asymmetries have many other factors. The trade data mismatch of India and China has attracted wide coverage from both electronic and print media. This mismatch is attributed to ‘under-invoicing’ by Indian importers for the imports originating from China. There is mismatch of $12 billion with China reporting its exports to India over $103 billion. Indian agencies, on the...