India may unveil new e-com policy in FY20: top official

10 Dec '19

2 min read

Pic: Shutterstock

India may unveil the e-commerce policy in this fiscal though no timeline can be offered, according to Guru Prasad Mohapatra, secretary, department for promotion of industry and internal trade, who said his department has just started stakeholder consultations and many organisations like the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) have already given feedback.

Mohapatra was speaking in Goa at the second edition of India Start-up Summit, a DPIIT initiative. The Data Privacy Bill of the information technology (IT) ministry is about privacy issues of personal data, he told a news agency.

The IT ministry recently moved the data privacy bill in the union cabinet which was approved and where privacy of personal data has so far been included. While the personal data of customers is protected by privacy laws across the world and also in the Indian Bill, non-personal data (NPD) remains largely unregulated.

NPD includes anonymised data like e-commerce data, climate trends collected by a weather app, or commuter patterns gathered by a cab aggregator, eating pattern of a particular region.

Mohapatra said the IT ministry had formed a separate committee on data localisation on anonymous data and it involved free flow, cross border issues as well.

Though multiple ministries are working on their own e-commerce rules, the umbrella e-commerce policy will be unveiled by the DPIIT.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)

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