Episode description

This week, Indian legislators approved a data protection law that will govern the processing of data in the country. The bill creates a data protection board and gives the government new powers, including to request information from companies and to issue orders to block content. While there is still work to do to determine how the law will be administered, it joins a range of new tech policy laws and regulations enacted against a backdrop of the increasing centralization of power in India’s government.

To discuss the bill, Justin Hendrix is joined by Aditi Agrawal, an independent technology journalist based in New Delhi; Kamesh Shekar, a tech policy expert who leads the privacy and data governance vertical at The Dialogue, a think tank based in Delhi; and Prateek Waghre, the Policy Director at the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy organization based in India.