With the increasing pressures from the US market on
reducing the outsourcing of IT jobs to India, there is a need for the Indian
BPOs to look at other countries including EU countries for the next wave of BPO
business.
EU Countries have however been very strict on the "Privacy
Rights" of individuals and maintain a strong Data Protection regime. If Indian
Business has to harness the opportunities from EU there is therefore a need to
satisfy the requirements of the EU data protection act. This can be done either
by the country itself adopting a suitable legislation which is applicable to all
Indian operators or the contracting parties entering into a suitable between the
contracting party and the Indian counter part so as to satisfy the requirements
of the EU Data Protection Act.
Until recently, Nasscom was reportedly working on a draft
legislation for a Data Protection Act. However recently it has shown a
preference for amendment of the Information Technology Act 2000 (ITA-2000) to
incorporate the requirements of the proposed data protection instead of a
separate Act.
It is therefore expected that the Ministry of Communications
and Information Technology will shortly come out with a draft amendment to
ITA-2000 and probably put it up for public comments as has been done in the past
for other legislations.
The amendments would primarily address the concerns of the
International Community on the legislative intent in India and the promotion of
a culture to respect privacy of data. The international community
especially the EU countries have not fully appreciated the rights of India to
protect its integrity as is evident on their responses to the problems in J & K
or North East.
Being a terrorist infested country, India needs to balance
the "Human Rights" or "Netizen's Rights" with the requirements of the country.
This would require the policies to tend towards providing more powers to the
Government agencies to monitor and forcefully obtain personal data. This is
likely to result in serious conflicts with the international agencies and local
NGOs.
The record of some of the local NGOs suggest that many of
them tend to think that "Human Rights" are there only for the Criminals
and Terrorists and not for the innocent common man.
We can therefore expect a strong backlash from this community
for any legislation that is perceived to hurt the freedom of the Netizens.
Considering the importance of the legislation there is a need
for a serious debate on the proposals before a law is passed.
Naavi.org therefore opens a discussion on the subject and
invites comments from the public.
As food for thought, we have the well researched article of
Mr Praveen Dalal which is published along side this article.
It is also proposed that a seminar will be organized in
Chennai during October to discuss the proposed legislation so that some feedback
can be provided to the Ministry.
I request all responsible legal luminaries in India to
provide their valuable inputs in the form of either short comments or detailed
suggestions so that all of them can be consolidated and presented to the
Government.
Naavi
August 26 2004
Related Articles:
DATA PROTECTION
LAW IN INDIA: A CONSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE..Praveen Dalal
