The government is not expected to release the Digital India Bill before the general elections in 2024, according to minister of state for electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
“I don’t think we will be able to catch the legislative window (for Digital India Bill) before the elections because we certainly need a lot of consultation and debate and discussion around it,” Chandrasekhar said at the FE.com Digifraud & Safety Summit, 2023.
The government, however, has readied a roadmap on the Bill, the policy goals and principles for safety and trust, the Minister added. The Bill, which seeks to replace the 22-year old IT Act, will define the regulations on emerging technologies, big tech companies, separate rules for different intermediaries such as e-commerce, search engines, gaming, etc, accountability of platforms like social media companies, misinformation, among other key things.
Similarly, the rules for the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act will also take time to be notified as the government is not looking to rush on the same and want to come out with a future ready framework.
“We are doing the rules very carefully. There are very deep significant changes in the framework that will evolve as a rule…so these are changes that will take time, that will require a particular framework that is absolutely future ready and can be tested in scale, in terms of all the other scenarios that will be thrown at the platforms,” Chandrasekhar said.
Through the rules, one such attempt which the government is trying to do is to ask the platforms to identify anonymous users.
“They (platforms) don’t even make an attempt to verify who the user is, whether it’s a man or a woman, whether it’s a bot or child. So I think we are going into a framework especially in child gating where platforms will have to evolve a framework and determine who the user is,” Chandrasekhar added.
The government will do a public consultation on the DPDP Act rules before taking it to the Parliament.
