Policy Square, a new series from Primus Partners, features expert policy interviews.
In collaboration with Businessworld, Primus Partners, one of India’s premier strategy consultancies, announced the launch of Policy Square. Policy Square, a Primus Partners initiative, is a monthly expert interview series in which key members of the public-policy ecosystem – senior policymakers, civil society members, business executives, and so on – are interviewed about critical issues and policies of national importance and their impact on the country and industry as a whole.
Primus Partners’ broad policy-regulatory knowledge and experience in delivering projects across many sectors inspired the Policy-Square series, to leverage this knowledge to offer a venue for in-depth dialogue.
Policy Square discussions will focus on policies, laws, and priorities that are crucial to India’s economic, societal, and developmental agenda.
The first episode of Policy-Square, which premiered today on Primus Partners’ YouTube channel, featured a deep dive into the Personal Data Protection Bill with Dr. Amar Patnaik, a Member of Parliament and a key member of the Joint Committee of Parliament debating the Bill.
On the essence of data ownership, Dr. Patnaik remarked that a fundamental benefit of the Data Protection Bill is that for the first time, data gatherers, collectors, and processors would be required to respect citizens’ privacy and will not consider themselves to be data owners. He declared unequivocally that the citizen is the exclusive owner of the data.
On non-personal data and sharing non-personal data with the government, Dr. Patnaik remarked that while the bill provides for NPD-sharing by organizations with the government, the commercials of data-sharing are currently unclear.
Because firms are investing time and money in data collection, Dr. Patnaik believes that in an ideal scenario, the government should examine contractual data sharing, which would include commercials to compensate the government for obtaining such data from companies
During his Policy-Square interview with Nilaya Varma, CEO Primus Partners, and Ruhail Amin, Senior Editor Business World, Dr. Patnaik discussed a variety of topics related to the Data Protection Bill, including Dr. Patnaik’s views on data ownership, anticipated implementation challenges, anticipated benefits of data localization, and the Committee’s overall deliberations.
On the bill’s governance, Dr. Patnaik spoke extensively about the necessity for state-level data protection authorities, without which the bill’s implementation is likely to be a significant difficulty.
State-level data protection authority, according to Dr. Patnaik, will allow state governments and citizens to readily engage with their state’s data regulator and request support, permissions, and exemptions as needed.
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