After the Minister of Railways and IT , Mr Ashwin Vaishnav publicly pleaded the Meity Secretary to confirm the date of release of the final rules related to DPDPA, one thought that there will be no turning back.
But it appears that the department still ignored Mr Vaishnav’s soft directive to release the rules by September 28th and prioritized the release of the draft rules on the PROGA 2025 which is anyway going to be delayed through a challenge in the Court.
Assuming that the MeitY is not defying their ministerial head, we can presume that the department is working on how the DPDPA rules can be used to give a strong reply to Mr Trump for his Tariff and H1B Visa attacks on India.
Mr Vaishnav has also encouraged ZOHO and his simple sentence that he is shifting to Arattai has created a big wave in favour of ZOHO. We also understand that CHINA is allowing ZOHO to operate in their country to erode Microsoft further.
But so far, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Meta and Amazon has controlled all narratives of policy in Indian IT. We have many times the practice of sharing proposed drafts of legislation with these US based Tech companies and heeding to their advice. NASSCOM unfortunately is in the control of these giants and hence this consultation with the industry often means seeking the permission from them to go ahead with our legislation.
We hope at least now MeitY shows its own commitment to Indigenisation by making “Personal Data Localization” mandatory within the next 6 months. We should also ensure that none of the DPB appointments should be based on the recommendations of Meta/Google/Microsoft. Alternatively Data transfer outside India should be subject to a special tariff.
We should also work for reducing our dependencies on the US IT services and encourage ZOHO, Jio, OLA and other Indian entities to take over the work which Meta, Google, Adobe, Amazon, Uber and Microsoft are doing today.
It is high time we create a new independent ministry on IT and appoint a suitable technocrat to head it.
Naavi
