Meenakshi Lekhi to head 30 member joint committee on Personal Data Protection Bill

BJP MP, Meenakshi Lekhi will be heading the joint committee of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha which will look into the Personal Data Protection Bill. The Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, Prahlad Joshi informed the houses that PM Modi wishes to elaborate discussions on the Bill as it has wide implications. Joshi also said that the committee includes a total of 30 members including Lekhi.  

After the Lok Sabha adopted a motion moved by the Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Wednesday the bill was referred to a joint committee. The committee formed to discuss the Data Protection Bill has a total of 20 members from the Lok Sabha and 10 from Rajya Sabha. They will have to submit their report on the first day of the last week of the next budget session. 

Read: Abhishek Singhvi distressed over proposed Data Protection Bill, calls it 'data access act'

Members of the committee 

MoS Parliamentary Affairs, Prahlad Joshi mentioned the names of 20 members from the Lok Sabha who will be part of the joint committee. The list includes Meenakshi Lekhi, PP Chaudhary, SS Ahluwalia, Tejasvi Surya, Ajay Bhatt, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Sanjay Jaiswal, Uday Pratap Singh, Kirit Premjibhai Solanki, Arvind Dharampuri, Heena Gavit, Rajeev Ranjan Singh, Gaurav Gogoi, Jothimani, Saugata Roy, Kanimozhi, PV Midhun Reddy, Shrikant Eknath Shinde, Bhartruhari Mahtab and Ritesh Pandey. After the list was announced, TMC said it wants to replace Saugata Roy with Mahua Moitra. 

Read: USIBC expresses concern over certain provisions on India's Personal Data Protection Bill

Data Protection Bill 

The much-talked-about legislation to protect personal data will allow the processing of private data without the explicit consent of the owner of the information for credit scores, debt recovery, security, operation of search engines and whistleblowing. The draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, which is likely to be introduced in the Lok Sabha in the next session, bars storing and processing of personal data by entities without the explicit consent of an individual. It, however, provides for exemptions for "reasonable purposes" such as "prevention and detection of any unlawful activity including fraud, whistleblowing, merger and acquisitions, network and information security, credit scoring, recovery of debt, processing of publicly available personal data, and the operation of search engines." 

(With ANI Inputs)

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