Giving sweeping exemptions to the government biggest concern in data bill: Justice BN Srikrishna

Sweeping exemptions to the government in the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022, is the concern, says Justice BN Srikrishna, retired judge of the Supreme Court of India who headed a 10-member committee that released the first draft of Personal Data Protection Bill in 2018. In an interview, Srikrishna told ET’s Suraksha P that the latest draft is not how he had originally envisaged the bill and that data stored in physical format should also be included under the bill’s purview. The retired judge also called for distinction between sensitive personal data and critical personal data, and flagged that even basic data about some people such as the chief of army or the President may be too critical to be stored in foreign locations. Edited excerpts of the interview: