The Data Protection Board will be independent of the government, but will also be under the scrutiny of an appeals process. The judgments made by the board will be transparent and will be available in the public domain, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics, and IT.
Chandrasekhar was speaking at the ‘Breakfast with businessline’ event in Bengaluru at the ITC Gardenia on Friday. The Minister said there will not be secretaries and joint secretaries of the government in the board, but will be run by an independent board.
The best way to ensure the efficacy, responsiveness, and integrity of the board is to have an appellant process, and keep the board in the know that it is under the scrutiny of the process.
“Independence cannot mean unaccountable, and I will give you chapters and verses on how regulators and so-called constitutional bodies in India over the last 70 years have in the name of independence gone rogue and had become unaccountable,” said Chandrasekhar.
He further said there would be oversight first from the appellant authority and then from the High Courts. Every judgment of the board will be transparent and will be uploaded on the website.
“When we build institutions in our country, we must make sure that institutions are built where the system itself creates a set of checks and balances and oversight that makes it perform the way the people of India wanted to perform. It is not just by using phrases like independent, constitutional, and statutory that makes the whole conversation really formal and hazy,” the minister noted.
Cyber crime
Chandrasekhar also spoke about the government’s efforts to prevent cyber crimes in the country. He said the government is creating dramatically new capabilities in terms of forensic identification of cyber crimes.
Responding to a query by Bhaskar Bhat, Director, Tata Sons, he noted that cyber crimes have a unique dimension and characteristic as it is a borderless space.
“As the victim, criminal, and authority are all in different jurisdictions, ethical policing does not work and network policing needs to be done. It is a very complex issue that normal law enforcement cannot do. Increasingly what governments are trying to do is to create a protocol of cooperation between governments to be able to address the issue. This approach is structural and systemic and the government is working on it,” the minister said.
The degree of sophistication of cyber crimes is racing far ahead of the conventional ability to police or detect them, he added. Underscoring the same, the Minister said he was on the dark web anonymously and noticed 16-18 year olds talk about hacking wallets and cloning SIM cards and all of the sophisticated technologies.