You're reading it here first: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is seeking additional comments on the Personal Data Protection Bill from a select group of stakeholders, S. Gopalakrishnan, Joint Secretary MEITY confirmed to MediaNama. Responses from the select stakeholders have been sought by August 25th 2019 by MEITY. On being asked about whether there will be a public consultation as well, Gopalakrishnan told MediaNama that no public consultation will follow, and they have only sought clarifications from some people (note: the questions, listed below don't seem to be 'clarifications'), because MEITY wanted additional feedback, in continuation to feedback being given to the draft data protection bill. MediaNama checked and multiple industry and civil society stakeholders who participated in the data protection bill consultation have said that they haven't received any such questions from MEITY. Gopalakrishnan told MediaNama that given that the ministry had received comments from over 600 entities, they will not reach out to 600 entities for further comments. Questions, of which MediaNama has received copies from multiple industry stakeholders include the following, although Gopalakrishnan did not specifically confirm them, saying that the questions aren't secret. They cover data localisation, enabling free access to non-personal and anonymised data, whether the Data Protection Authority should also govern non-personal data. The additional questions Does the draft Bill impose adequate obligations on the data fiduciary? The draft bill proposes that all personal data needs to be stored in India whereas significant number of feedback received suggests that restriction on cross…
