Public Policy Forum & LITFest 2021: Public Policy Post COVID

Public Policy Forum: Public Policy Post-COVID

PDP BILL AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

‘Data’ has emerged as the essence of most modern-day economies. In this era of big data many firms derive their value from exclusive data access and other intangible assets, as opposed to machinery and other physical assets. The innate characteristics of ‘data’ raise several policy questions related to its value, ownership, regulation and sovereignty. Often to achieve national objectives, conflicts get created and need resolution-in the data space the potential policy conflicts are just more profound. Consequently, only a few countries have enacted data protection regulations while others have started the process. The Indian Government constituted a Data Protection Committee (DPC) in 2017 which proposed a comprehensive law on data protection. The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 was introduced in the Parliament on 11 December 2019 and the proposed legislation is currently being analysed by a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). The proposed legislation seeks to provide for the protection of personal data of individuals and proposes a framework for processing of such data by other entities. The overarching goal of this discussion would be to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed legislation in striking a balance between protecting a nascent but fast-growing digital economy in India and the rights of over a billion users.

The panel discussion will deliberate the following questions:

What are the implementation gaps and challenges in the proposed Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 including institutionalising and functioning of the Data Protection Authority (DPA)?
What will be the economic implications of the proposed legislation? How would the compliance requirements impact firms in the long and short run? Will the legislation impact India’s trade competitiveness, especially in the services sector?
Has privacy emerged as an important form of non-price competition? Do existing/ proposed legislations allow for institutional collaborations to assess and regulate this aspect of privacy? If not, is this necessary?

Beyond Ease of Doing Business Rankings

The Government of India has wholeheartedly adopted the World Bank’s approach to rank countries on its Ease of Doing Business indicators. It has aimed improvements on rankings with a single-minded pursuit. The Government has even launched the Business Reform Action Plan to rank states on business reforms they claim to have implemented, and promoted competitive federalism.

Despite benefits and shortcomings of rankings, it is becoming evident that climbing charts cannot become an end in itself and much more efforts are required on the ground to make life easier for entrepreneurs, both small and large, each facing their unique sets of challenges.

These challenges can be broadly categorised into stock and flow of regulatory requirements. The former relates to existing requirements, and their implementation and the latter with the manner in which such requirements are changed.

Subjecting the existing requirements to a three-step test of legality, necessity and proportionality, and the proposals to a cost-benefit analysis would be necessary to address such challenges. This will require institutionalising reforms such as regulatory impact assessment. The panel discusses the following:

Is the government right in spending and capacity on ease of doing business rankings or such rankings should be discarded in favour of other result-oriented measures?
What reforms should government adopt to take its ease of doing business efforts to the next level and is there something we can learn from other successful countries?
How to overcome bureaucratic preference to status-quoism and apathy to change and what incentives are needed to ensure effective adoption and implementation of such new sets of reforms?

India & Emerging Global Trade Imperatives

In the post-COVID world, with key economies raising barriers to international trade it could seem that the era of large regional trade agreements are over. Two contradictory events recently; the first was that ASEAN+5 made operational the Regional Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement. India as it decided in 2019, stayed away. the other is UK walked away from what was essentially a regional trading agreement—the European Union as Brexit. Meanwhile a new US administration takes over, which is far less hostile to the idea of trade agreements.

The world is divided between the need for ensuring safety in their supply networks and so bringing manufacturing closer home, yet realising that growth is only possible to give a fillip to with deeper trade networks. The panel discusses the following:

Will this then move the needle away from regional trading blocs to bilateral free trade agreements?
Will countries like India and UK be more keen to enter such agreements?
What then happens to the 18 odd 18 regional trade agreements India is a signatory to?

Contextualising New Education Policy

India has recently come up with its New Education Policy (NEP). Given the history of policymaking for the education sector in India, since independence, this is the fourth document to have been introduced by the government, the last one being developed in 1992. The promulgation of the new policy raises a fundamental question about the need of having a new policy. One may also ask how new the latest policy document is compared to its predecessors. The Panel Discussion aims at contextualising the policy vis-à-vis the ground level reality. It discusses the following:

What perceptible changes are observed in the recent policy document in terms of objectives, intent and operational details compared to the earlier ones?
What were the felt-needs of introducing the new policy?
How well does this policy document capture in a seamless way the interactions among primary, secondary and higher education systems?
How to take care of the resource constraints that may come in the way of achieving the policy objectives?

Private vs Public: Policy Direction for Public Health

Health policy is a tough call. Thinking about market failure and state capacity from first principles is required in public health and in healthcare. There are market failures in public goods and externalities that essentially constitute ‘public health’. Equally, there are market failures in asymmetric information and market power that shape healthcare. The debate then is whether we need more state or less in public health and healthcare. There is a lot of interest in technological fixes, all the way from National Digital Health Blueprint to Artificial Intelligence to replace doctors. This panel tries to put the role of state, private sector and digital technologies in context such that India may finally get a winning policy prescription for health that is widely acceptable.

Channeling Research into Public Policy

This panel focuses on the role that research institutions, academia, and Universities can play in times when reactions to public policy and governance challenges are increasingly becoming polarised along political lines, mainstream media is largely seen to be biased, and effective and deep research and analysis into questions of public policy is lacking. It focuses largely on four themes:

In light of the quivering pillars of the fourth estate, is the onus of creating an informed civil society on academia?
How do we make specialised academic research more mainstream and help create informed debate in light of recent global events?
How should academia break free from the echo chamber of academic journals?
What is the role that students and policy professionals could play in catalysing this change?

Arjun Munda

Hon’ble Minister of Tribal Affairs

Meenakshi Lekhi

Chairperson, Joint Parliamentary Committee on PDP Act

Meenakshi Lekhi

Chairperson, Joint Parliamentary Committee on PDP Act

A second-term elected Parliamentarian and distinguished lawyer of the Supreme Court with a career spanning over three decades. She is a renowned socio-political activist who has been associated with institutions including the National Commission of Women, Sakshi, NIPCD amongst several others. In addition to having worked extensively with several not-for-profits, she has served as a member of the drafting committee of “Women Reservation Bill” & “Problem of Sexual Harassment at Workplace”; the latter being passed by the Parliament of India. She even represented the media in court to get the ban on media coverage of the case proceedings revoked and she was successful in this effort.

She has been actively involved in women empowerment, she took up the case of the permanent commissioning of women in the Indian armed forces with the Supreme Court. She was the lawyer of the victim in the Shanti Mukund Hospital rape case; took up the case of Promotion Policy for Army Officer and the Permanent Commission of women in the Indian armed forces in the Supreme Court. The judgement has paved the way for women officers to hold command posts.

Most recently, as the Chairperson of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 she has been entrusted with ideating on a legislation which has the potential to shape and protect the privacy, personal dignity and security of India and its citizens. The committee has recently asked some very pertinent and tough questions to several of the world’s leading social media, technology and e-commerce companies operating in India about their policies and practices with regards to the safety and security of the privacy of Indian citizens and their personal data.

Positions Held

2010: National Vice President, BJP Mahila Morcha
May 2014: Elected to 16th Lok Sabha
June 2014 – May 2019: Member, House Committee
Sep 2014 – Jul 2016: Member, Committee on Privileges; Member, Press Council of India; Member, Standing Committee on Urban Development
Dec 2014 – May 2019: Member, Joint Committee on Offices of Profit
Jul 2016 – May 2019: Chairperson, Committee on Privileges
Nov 2017: Member, Press Council of India
June 2019 onwards: Member, Panel of Chairpersons, Lok Sabha
July 2019 onwards: Chairperson, Committee on Public Undertakings
September 2019 onwards: Member, Standing Committee on External Affairs
October 2019 onwards: Member, Committee on Privileges
December 2019 onwards: Chairperson, Joint Committee on the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019
Nov 2019 onwards: Member, General Purposes Committee, Lok Sabha; Member, Consultative Committee, Ministry of Defence