The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023, zipped through Lok Sabha faster than a bullet train
First of all, kudos to the Mother of Democracy for setting new world records every day for fastest-ever law-making. Did you know the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 (DPDP Bill) zipped through Parliament faster than a bullet train? Sadly, instead of welcoming this new law by lighting kuthuvilakku and banging kadais, India’s intellectual class, especially the activist types, has been cribbing non-stop.
I don’t understand how there are still activists left in India, given the hard work put in by the government to scrap their FCRA and starve their employers of funds. But evidently they’ve survived, and it’s alarming how much misinformation they’ve been spreading around this latest brilliant legislation from the honourable Indian government.
But there’s a silver lining: once this Bill comes into effect, India will be rid of all activists, including the peskiest of them all — the RTI activists.
Anyway, as a patriotic data donor, I feel duty-bound to clear the air around the DPDP Bill. I am summarising below the seven pillars of India’s data policy.
1. Your data belongs to Annadata
You may have heard of the motto ‘data is oil’. Thanks to colonial hangover, many Indians still parrot it, forgetting their own heritage dating back 7,000 years when ancient rishis used to collect all kinds of personal data from their shishyas and bhakts through telepathy and store it in the seven chakras of their body for eleven yugas. There was no nonsense like ‘informed consent’ because they knew that all individual streams of data merge eventually with the Annadata — ‘the supreme provider’, which in our case is the government. It is this ancient Indic data philosophy that has found expression in the DPDP Bill, 2023.
2. You are, because of Aadhaar
As they say on the dark web, “Aadhaar hai, toh dhandha hai” (So long as there is Aadhaar, we are in business’). Unfortunately, there are still dozens of people — mostly in institutions not yet surveyed by the IT department — who are trapped in the delusion that they ‘own’ the data they cannot help but generate. They refuse to accept the reality that their very existence is defined by their ability to emit data. Aadhaar, then, is humanity’s first ontological iteration of the nature of the relationship between humans and data. It is India’s greatest contribution to post-human technology, and will be recognised as such, if not by today’s humans, then by tomorrow’s AI.
This column is a satirical take on life and society.
3. Maximum data security
Can anyone deny that the government has the best security resources? The DPDP Bill, for the first time in human history, will ensure Z-plus security to all user data, which will be stored behind walls that are 14-feet-high and manned by (King) Cobra commando units. All you need to do is hand over your personal data to the government and forget all about it. What could be easier?
4. Maximum data privacy
It is well documented that the biggest threat to privacy is from people who want to know everything about what a public servant is secretly doing behind closed doors in a government office. You tell me: how can public servants make money unless they have full privacy from prying citizens? Hence the DPDP Bill downsizes the Right to Information Act (RTI Act) so that it becomes more user-unfriendly and people will gradually stop wasting everyone’s time with RTI applications.
5. You are Jon Snow
Any shrink will tell you that the less you know, the better for your mental health. Hence this Bill makes it fine for companies to not tell you which all third (fourth, fifth and hundredth) parties they are sharing your data with. What will you do with all that information anyway — build Taj Mahal? Know nothing, be happy.
6. Data discipline
Indians are World No.1 in litigation. Many of us file PILs and complaints as post-retirement hobby. To make sure you don’t complain frivolously every time your CoWin data or bank data or Aadhaar data is leaked in a data breach, the Bill has a provision to penalise you in case you do. Makes sense, no?
7. Right to surveillance
If you as a citizen believe you have a Right to Information, then isn’t it only fair that the government also has an equal and opposite Right to Information about you? That’s why the DPDP Bill empowers the government to collect whatever data it wants about whoever it wants, whenever it wants, as many times it wants, and store it as long as it wants. Needless to say, it’s all only for greater national security.
The author of this satire is Social Affairs Editor, ‘The Hindu’.
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
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