Reconciling Blockchain and Data Protection Regimes

India per se does not have a data protection regime but rather aspires to have one in the immediate future. One fact which surely cannot be denied is that India has been caught off guard on count of the data protection regime, mostly because of its shallow history of privacy jurisprudence. This is unlike its Western counterparts, specifically European Union (EU), where there is a sound culture of privacy and data protection. A data protection bill titled the “Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019”¹ (PDP Bill) is still to be enacted. However, given the speed of technological advancement, the bills run a risk of turning redundant very soon.

On 24 August 2017, the Supreme Court² recognised privacy as a fundamental right, which was followed by a lot of legislative activity for safeguarding various facets of privacy. One such facet of privacy recognised by the Court is informational privacy or famously styled as “right to self-determination,” knowing that the existence of virtual life is an essential facet of one’s life; therefore, every individual should have a right to control the inflow or outflow of the infor­mation pertaining to them. Hence, in pursuance to the above obj­ective the union government app­ointed a committee under the chairpersonship of the former Supreme Court judge B N Krishna³ to evaluate the current status of data protection regime in India as well as come up with a suggestion for the new law. The committee submitted its report in 2018, which became the basis for the PDP Bill. However, the bill, as suggested by the Krishna Committee, has again gone through drastic changes and has shed(ed) some important elements and added certain (un)wanted elements in the new data protection bill of 2019. Further, the bill has been referred to a parliamentary committee headed by Meenakshi Lekhi, a member of Parliament.