Srikrishna panel report on data protection by the end of May

The government-appointed BN Srikrishna committee for suggesting a framework and a new law for protecting institutional and private data in India will submit its report by the end of May, a member of the panel, who doesn’t want to be identified, said on Tuesday.

According to the member, the committee held four public consultations with stakeholders. “We will address all legitimate concerns raised in the consultations.”

The ministry of electronics and information technology constituted the 10-member panel headed by retired Supreme Court judge Srikrishna in August last year. Other than suggesting solutions on issues related to data protection, the committee will submit the draft for a new law.

Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in February the government will come up with a law soon after the panel submits its report.

According to experts, current laws are inadequate to deal with privacy concerns.

“A data privacy law should have come soon after the Justice AP Shah committee (group of experts on privacy formed in November 2011) submitted its report. There has been considerable delay by the government in enacting a law,” lawyer Apar Gupta said.

Gupta is among a group of 20 experts and lawyers that petitioned the Srikrishna committee last year and expressed fears regarding its functioning.

“The committee’s terms were to try and balance the right to privacy with promoting innovation. That should not be the case, the law should be built around privacy concerns at the centre,” he said. The Shah committee submitted its report in October 2012.

The Srikrishna committee’s report is likely to assume significance as data leak has become a hotly debated subject amid the controversy that UK-based firm Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook users’ details for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

NEW DELHI: