Government to do away with data localisation requirement in new Personal Data Protection Bill draft

The government will propose to allow transfer of data and its storage in “trusted geographies” in the revised draft of the data protection Bill, doing away with the data localisation requirement proposed in the earlier version, people privy to the matter told ET. The government will define which geographies are “trusted” from time to time.

Criminal penalties proposed on employees of companies involved in data breach also will be scrapped in the new draft, which is likely to be released for public consultation this week. Instead, financial penalties of as much as Rs 200 crore, multiplied by the number of users impacted, will be imposed per breach, an official said. A Data Protection Board will be set up to “adjudicate the consequences of any data breaches” and decide on the penalty, this official added.