Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019

 The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was originally focused on core issues of data protection and information privacy like trusted hardware, certification, non personal data, and data localisation. All of these issues are creeping into the legislation because of the gaps that exist in the IT Act. The government had two options where it could create a complex law that could be inconvenient as it would cause tremendous amount of compliance challenges for start-ups or to go back and do do a clean slate where do framework of laws and politics. The framework will have a new digital privacy bill which will update the IT Act, the national data governance framework policy. 

The government withdrew the deliberated Bill on Monday saying it will be replaced with something that has a 'comprehensive framework' and is in alignment with 'contemporary digital privacy laws'. The bill was first introduced to the Lok Sabha in 2019 and was later tabled to a Joint Parliamentary Committee(JPC) which tabled its report in December, 2021. 

Even with suggested changes by the committee the bill was flawed. The citizens would get little protection against the government snooping but the bill would have also offered higher levels of protection against cybercrime and would have instituted better safeguards against misuse of data by private agencies.