The Digital Personal Data Protection bill has not been referred to any committee, according to Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, and it can only be done if it is introduced in the Parliament.
Chandrasekhar made his remarks in response to a letter submitted by Rajya Sabha member John Brittas on July 28 asking the speaker of the Lok Sabha and the head of the Rajya Sabha to prevent the introduction of a report from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT.
Curiously, Chandrasekhar also charged Brittas, a fellow committee member, with spreading false information about the bill that was, according to Birittas, “adopted” by the committee. A few days ago, Brittas and other opposition lawmakers from the IT committee left the meeting when the committee, presided over by Shiv Sena MP Jadhav Prataprao Ganpatrao, adopted a report backing the bill.
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The members who opposed the report said that they were not provided with the updated version of the DPDP law, which had been approved by the Union Cabinet, and as a result were not aware of the report’s creation. The committee demanded that the DPDP Bill be passed into law right now, in the report.
According to a tweet from Chandrasekhar, no bill including the proposed DPDP can be referred to any committee unless it is done by Parliament. In turn, the bill can be only referred to committee only after the Cabinet-approved bill is introduced in Parliament. He added that DPDP has not been introduced into Parliament and so question of considering it in committee does not arise.
However, earlier, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of electronics and information technology, courted controversy when he said, in a specific day, that the IT Committee had “approved” the bill. The minister’s assertions have been deemed untrue by committee members like Karti Chidambaram, Jawhar Sircar, and Brittas.
