The Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Personal Data Protection Bill has summoned cybersecurity firm Cyble and payments company PayPal for depositions later today. The Committee has also summoned Bangalore-based think tank iSPIRT, and card network companies Mastercard and Visa for deposition on November 20. Today, the JPC will also hear from companies that have not submitted their post-evidence replies. This follows four meetings of a clause-by-clause analysis of the Bill that were held between November 11 and 12. These four meetings were attended by 11, 12, 15 and 16 members, respectively. The JPC, headed by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha MP Meenakshi Lekhi, has 30 members. iSPIRT is a Bangalore-based, private technology think-tank that “convert[s] ideas into policy proposals to take to government stakeholders”. It was established in 2013 and was initially mentored by Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairperson of Infosys and the architect of Aadhaar. Its donors include Ajay Data (Data Infosys), Sameer Nigam (PhonePe) and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Paytm) to name a few. Its volunteers include Lalitesh Katragadda (ex-Google), B.G. Mahesh (co-founder of Sahamati), Kunal Shah (CRED), among many others. It is the think-tank behind India Stack, Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, National Health Stack, Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) and other public tech stacks in India. India Stack's project roadmap has relied on UIDAI and NPCI deploying these projects. Why Cyble? Recently, The Ken reported that the Atlanta-headquartered cybersecurity firm Cyble, headed by Beenu Arora, that has flagged data breaches at BigBasket and RedDoorz, has a…
