According to the joint parliamentary committee on personal data protection, in its final report, reintroduced a recommendation for stiff penalties for serious data violations, with fines of up to Rs 15 crore, or 4% of global turnover, while lesser violations will be confined to Rs 5 crore, or 2% turnover.
The final report, which was presented to Parliament on Thursday, reinstated penalties, which had been left to the discretion of the government in the draught report, and was in line with the original provisions of the 2019 Data Protection Bill as well as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The proposal to remove the sections sparked intense debate in the joint parliamentary committee, and committee chair and senior BJP leader PP Chaudhary decided that the penalties should be reinstated with a cap on the number of fines when opposition MPs raised objections.
The provision was removed from the draft report, which left the issue of punishment quantification in the hands of the central government.
“In the Committee’s view, such quantification may not be feasible as there are no clear mechanisms to quantify the ‘worldwide turnover of the company and that that too along with its group entities. Also keeping in view the rapidly changing dynamics of the evolving digital technologies, the committee feels that it would be prudent to enable the government to quantify the penalties,” the had said in its draft report of November.
Who Was The Panel Member?
Jairam Ramesh, Manish Tewari, Vivek Tankha, and Gaurav Gogoi (all from the Congress), Derek O’Brien and Mahua Moitra (both from the Trinamool Congress), and Amar Patnaik and Bhartruhari Mahtab (both from the Biju Janat Dal) are among the panel members who objected to the specific penalty formula being scrapped.
How The Re-introduction Of The Penalties Be A Worrying Fact?
Now, do you believe the reintroduction of the penalties would be a troubling fact for all the popular companies which are already under the watch in India for a variety of infractions, including a CBI investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal?
Not just this, there is also investigation going on data violations against Amazon and its handling of data in India.