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Day 1 of the Parliament Monsoon Session 2022 concluded on July 18, 2022, where a total of 32 Bills were pushed (of which only 14 are ready). Despite a barrage of Bills, the much-awaited Crypto Bill, 2021 and the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, did not make it to this session.

Some of the Bills that made it to the session included the Press and Registration of Periodicals Bill, 2022, The Competition (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Coffee (Promotion and Development) Bill, 2022, and many more. Pending Bills such as the Inter-State River Water Disputes (Amendment) Bill, 2019 were also taken up.

As for the Crypto & the Personal Data Protection Bill, the industry will have to wait a little more for clearance.

The Crypto Bill Deferred For The Third Time

The Crypto Bill was first scheduled to be tabled in Parliament’s winter session in 2021 and later deferred as the cabinet did not clear it. It had sought to ban the use of private cryptocurrencies as ‘currencies’ while allowing exceptions to a few use cases. The Bill seeks to minimise financial stability risk by suitably ring-fencing the formal financial sector from crypto assets.

The yet again exclusion of the Crypto Bill in the monsoon session of the parliament has several stakeholders in uncertainty and apprehension about whether the government would ban cryptocurrencies in the country. Thus, in relief to the industry, even though the Bill found no mention, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that RBI wants cryptocurrencies banned. The government, though, is looking to regulate them. The consensus is that CBDCs will likely come out before the Crypto Bill gets enacted.

The move also comes when the industry does not have an independent regulatory body representing them. With the dissolution of the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council (BACC), the industry is now mulling to launch another council to raise awareness within the sector. 

Even without a law, crypto startups have been marred by a slew of regulations. Crypto income has been levied a 30% tax, and a 1% TDS on transactions of more than INR 10,000 and may attract GST, too. 

PDP Bill In Cabinet For Three Years Now

The draft of the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill was submitted to the then minister of law and justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad in June 2019. It was also made available to the public to seek stakeholders’ comments. The Bill was scheduled to be tabled in the Parliament’s monsoon/winter session in 2019 but got deferred. 

The new IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, then, in March 2022, stated that the government will get the Parliament’s nod latest by the monsoon session on the PDP Bill.

He had said, “I think we should be able to resolve them very soon and bring it. Our target was this Budget session itself, but, definitely, by the monsoon session, we should be able to do that.”

In 2019, the NDA government made it to the Centre for the second time. It had then promised to protect the data of Indians in line with counterparts such as the EU’s GDPR. It undertook various initiatives and plans, including data localisation rules, seeking greater accountability from social media channels and raising the age of users consenting to data sharing to 18.

The Data Protection Bill has been contested by several authorities including the internet and mobile association (IAMAI) and the Internet Freedom Foundation. Later, an ad-hoc joint committee of parliament headed by a BJP Lok Sabha MP PP Chaudhary, was also founded to make relevant updates to the Bill.

After almost two years of deliberation, the committee tabled its report in both houses in December, making close to 100 recommendations.

While unsaid, the hold-up seems to be about the thin line between definitions of personal and non-personal data when large amounts of data are collected, processed and transmitted. The committee is reportedly still working on recommendations and updates and is likely to exclude non-personal data in the PDP Bill.