Govt plans penalty of up to ₹500cr for data breach

Draft Bill Eases Cross-Border Data Transfer

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New Delhi: The government on Friday released the draft personal data protection bill, seeking to provide a framework for a strict user-consent regime for data processing, along with a penalty of up to Rs 500 crore for data breaches by social media and net companies while offering concessions to tech firms.

Tech majors such as Google, Amazon and Meta are seen benefitting from the new draft which eases certain curbs on cross-border data transfer unlike previous versions where conditions had been specified although it's silent on the need to maintain mirror copies (within India) of "sensitive personal data" such as financial, health and biometric information of users. In August, the government had junked the earlier draft.

New Delhi: The new draft personal data protection bill released on Friday addresses several sticking points in the previous draft which global tech companies had opposed, such as restrictions on the transfer of such data as well as the need to store it within India (called data localisation).