The full text of the judgement by the Supreme Court of India setting timeframes for Governors to respond to Bills passed by Legislative Assemblies.

Academic freedom has gained a sense of urgency in India over the past decade. While there were fleeting attempts in the past, the current rightward shift in politics has placed restraints on knowledge creation in India and across other democracies.

In this Essay, Zoya Hasan, Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, examines and connects the prevailing political intolerance to the spawning of a culture of anti-intellectualism, which have combined to fetter scholarly pursuits in India. This process has manifested itself in predictable forms – many direct, some indirect. Although such censorious and conformist tendencies are from the right-wing playbook, Professor Hasan also points out that there is pushback from the academia and elsewhere.

One of the many fallouts of societies making the transition to the digital way of life is the porous interplay between personal and public domains. The role of a state as the protector of individual rights requires it to frame laws that directly safeguard its citizens and ensure the integrity of personal data which people have to part with to gain access to services – both in public and private sectors.

India, with the world’s largest biometric data and digital payment users, is a vast depository of ubiquitous details – phone numbers, emails, and so on – which are, in effect, unique identifiers. The manner in which these are safeguarded by the agencies that collect them is a process that is barely transparent. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP), flows from the 2017 Puttaswamy judgment which brought to focus the right to privacy and effectively established it as a fundamental right under Art. 21-Right to Life and Personal Liberty. The Act “provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognises both the right of individuals to protect their personal data and the need to process such personal data for lawful purposes and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto”. The framing of the Draft Rules under this Act in January marks an important step in the role of the state pertaining to data and the individual.

In this article, Sarah Abraham, a Partner at a legal firm, Advocate/Mediator, Madras High Court, and a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E), flags key elements of the draft DPDP Rules, such as the role of Consent Managers, the need to strengthen protection of data relating to children, addressing manipulative techniques to obtain consent, and reporting thresholds for data breaches. Ms. Abraham’s suggestions include improvements and modifications to the nature, language, and coverage envisaged in the Draft Rules, to ensure “comprehensive protection to personal data and lend a common ground for Indian businesses in the context of cross border data flow”.