The IT Ministry has invited comments on the Srikrishna committee's data protection bill. Comments can be posted here. till the 5th of September 2018, that is 20 days from now. This further consultation takes special significance due to the contentious nature of the draft bill — there were voices of dissent from within the committee that found place on its official report. The data protection bill's provisions on maintaining a copy of personal data in India and its stiff criminal penalties for breaches have also drawn criticism. Read: All roads of data sovereignty lead to a dystopia It's unclear if the comments to the draft bill collected by MeitY will be made public. Public comments solicited by the Srikrishna Committee prior to the bill's drafting stage were not made public. In fact, MeitY declined multiple RTI requests to publish stakeholder comments. It's also unclear if MeitY will hold a counter-comment stage of consultation, where stakeholders will be able to comment on each other's responses. This two-stage process is typical of TRAI consultations, where comments are made public and commented on in a counter-comment stage as a matter of process. How the bill measures up While comments to the Srikrishna Committee were not published, some organisations made their filings public voluntarily. Here's a comparison of the Srikrishna Committee's bill with the expectations of i) Dvara Research, which prepared a skeletal draft bill of its own, and ii) SaveOurPrivacy.in, a volunteers' collective spearheaded by the Internet Freedom Foundation (Note: MediaNama editor and publisher Nikhil…
