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...

-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...

-TheWire.in The withdrawn Bill had, controversially, sought to provide the government with powers to exempt its probe agencies from the provisions of the Act. New Delhi: The government on Wednesday withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill from the Lok Sabha and said it would come out with a “set of new legislation” that will fit into a ‘comprehensive legal framework’. IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said this while moving for withdrawal of the Bill...

-Newsclick.in The Bill and the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s recommendations are riddled with many problems, and some of them are giving rise to serious concerns over enabling the State with surveillance power. The much-awaited Joint Parliamentary Committee’s report on the country's first comprehensive data protection law has been tabled in the Parliament. After two years of intense deliberation and consultation, the report was finalised and adopted. The law, if passed, would regulate data...