Technology, Media and Telecom

After days of prolonging uncertainty amongst telecom service providers (TSPs) with regard to the use of Aadhaar based e-KYC for verification and reverification of subscriber in wake of the Supreme Court (SC)’s judgment dated 26 September 2018 (Aadhaar Judgment), the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India (DoT) has issued a notification on 26 October 2018 (Notification) to put this issue to rest.

In July 2017, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India had constituted a committee of experts (Committee) under the chairmanship of a retired judge of the Supreme Court, Mr B N Srikrishna, to examine and propose changes to the data protection regime in India. In December 2017, the Committee published a white paper on the data protection framework proposed for India

On 19 June 2018, the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India (DoT) finally provided its nod to several key recommendations (Recommendations) made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on the Regulatory Framework for Internet Telephony in October 2017. DoT has released a clarification (Clarification) and certain amendments to existing licenses (Amendment), both of which are slated to take effect immediately.

The Department of Telecom (DoT) has issued a notification dated 16 May 2018 (Notification) which prescribes know your customer (KYC) norms for issuing subscriber identity module (SIM) cards to be used in machine to machine (M2M) communications. Amongst other things, the Notification also deals with the restrictions and ownership related aspects of SIMs to be used in M2M devices.

On 21 March 2018, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) placed the draft of the Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA) in public domain for inviting comments. DISHA aims to secure the privacy and confidentiality of digital health data (DHD) in India.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank and the regulator for payment systems in India, in its press release dated 5 April 2018 (Press Release) on Statement on Development and Regulatory Policies of the First Bi-monthly Monetary Policy Statement for 2018-19, had announced that all payment system operators would need to ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them are stored only within India within a period of six months. RBI had indicated that detailed instructions would follow in a week’s time.