Digital India Act draft will come up ‘very soon’: Chandrasekhar

The Centre will release the draft of the Digital India Act “very soon”, said Minister of State (MoS) for IT and Electronics Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday.

“It will come very soon. Unfortunately, I accept that we have delayed by about a month, personally due to a number of other responsibilities that came up. But I assure you that this successor Act to the IT Act will be soon placed before the people for their detailed consultation,” Chandrasekhar told reporters in a press conference in the national capital.

On asked about concrete timelines, the minister said, “…we consider a deep consultation and consensus around legislation from the people and all the stakeholders to be as equally important as the timelines by which the law is enacted.”

He added that the government will come up with a law of global standard. “That is something that everybody agrees to as our main outcome out of these deliberations,” he said.

News agency PTI reported in May that the Digital India framework will have a chapter dedicated to emerging technologies, specifically artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, and how to regulate them.

Chandrasekhar is currently holding extensive consultations with all stakeholders for the draft of the Digital India Act, which will replace the two-decade-old IT Act.

Responding to a question on the Karnataka High Court junking Twitter’s petition challenging several blocking and take down orders issued by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), he said, “I don’t see this as being in favor of the government. Our relationship with the platform has not or is not adversarial. We have only insisted that the laws be followed and be complied with.”

According to the minister, Twitter was given “a large number of directions under the law”, which they did not comply with after which a legal notice was sent to the microblogging platform.

“And this is part of the fiction that Mr. Dorsey had also put out. We had always said that despite repeated non-compliance by this platform, the government did very little to them, accepting to send them a notice and remind them to comply. I’m very glad that the orders today were laid down very clearly that non-compliance is not an option, regardless of where your jurisdiction is. Platforms in India, whether Indian or foreign, have to comply with the Indian law,” Chandrasekhar said.

In addition to dismissing Twitter’s petition, the Karnataka HC has also imposed a cost of Rs 50 lakh on the company. The fine has to be paid to the Karnataka State Legal Services Authority within 45 days.