A national non-personal data protection (NPD) authority must be established by the Indian government according to a recommendation by a committee led by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, Economic Times reported. The recommendation has been made in the draft Bill and the final report submitted to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) two months ago, the report added. The final report also classifies companies that control high amounts of data as “data businesses” and explains what constitutes a “high value data” set; the government or other companies will be able to access these data sets at a price decided by the market forces, as per ET. The expert committee had come out with a draft in July 2020, and released a revised version on which it invited comments from stakeholders in December 2020. The final report takes into account all the feedback received by the expert committee. The committee’s job was to study use cases of NPD and prescribe a regulatory structure for NPD in the country. NPD can be defined as data without any Personally Identifiable Information such as: Data not related to individuals/national persons (weather, from industrial sensors, from public infrastructure). Data that has been anonymised or aggregated so that individual data is not identifiable. An authority on NPD is crucial in implementing the law laid down by the government, however, it is likely that a separate authority for NPD will clash with the authority envisaged in the draft bill for personal data. Concerns around the regulatory…
