In India we have a strange Governmental oversight on IT law and IT promotion. The conflict in MeitY being the law maker as well as the promoter of IT is getting more and more pronounced b the day. One recent example is the intention if MeitY to promote the use of AI, Promote foreign IT entities who are members of NASSCOM against the duty to regulate the industry through DPDPA or ITA 2000.
Sooner this is corrected, better it is for the Modi Government as otherwise this will be the next stick with which the opposition will start fighting with the Government.
Recently MeitY in association with iSpirit released a framework called Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for AI training. The essential purpose of this is to enable data of Indian entities to be shared for AI training.
Without a reservation of the data sharing to purely indigenous firms, MeitY is openign the gates for gross misuse by foreign AI entities to siphon off the Indian soveriegn data for training of models of Open AI, Anthropic, Meta and Google. Any ampount of assurance on secured data transfer, does not convince us that the real intention of the proposal is to legally enable the foreign entities to access valuable Indian corporate data bypassing the DPDPA.
The regulator for DPDPA is the same MeitY which has released this feramework. In the past it was the MeitY which supported the idea that we should use AI for entire enterprise level DPDPA compliance and eliminate Lawyers.
Some time back, it was the Ministry of Finance which used a similar strategy and enabled siphoning off of CIBIL data to a foreign entity, when it was under the control of Mr Chidambaram and RBI was under the control of Raghuram Rajan. This story is now getting repeated in the data scenario with foreign AI companies getting a legal gateway to access soverign Indian data.
It is impossible to expect that MeitY being the regulator for its own industry promotional policies there would be balance in the decision making process.
I therefore urge the PMO to take a call on how to break the conflict in MeitY’s activities of framing of IT laws, regulating IT laws and also promote the industry. A similar conflict had been pointed out by the undersigned regarding the activities of the IT secretaries of State Governments as Adjduicators of ITA 2000.
Probably this question will now come up for discussion at the Supreme Court in one of the challenges that has been mounted on DPDPA. I wish the Government wakes up before the Supreme Court passes an stringent remarks and forces the hands of the Government.
Naavi
