The draft Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025
(Draft Data Privacy Rules), intended to implement
India's new privacy law, were released for public comments on
January 3, 2025. This step comes more than 7 years after the
inciting incident that triggered the search for a new data privacy
law. It was on September 26, 2018, that the Indian Supreme Court
ruled information privacy as a fundamental right, and required the
Indian Government to come up with a new data law.
The 7 years that have passed since the Puttaswamy
judgment have seen continuing rapid growth in digitalisation in
India and across the world; we have also been through a global
pandemic, 2 national elections in India, and the experience of the
implementation of the EU GDPR in 2018. More recently the emergence
of game-changing new technologies such as generative AI have
challenged privacy regulations and models.
