KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

The Status of Policing Report in India 2023 (SPIR) was released on 31 March in New Delhi by Common Cause and Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. SPIR 2023 study explores public opinions and experiences regarding digital surveillance in India. Recent developments, such as the Supreme Court's recognition of the right to privacy and discussions surrounding Data Protection, have intensified debates around privacy and surveillance. The study also considers...

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...

-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...