Technology Policy Priorities for Indian Government post-2024 Elections
This is a post authored by Mr Abhivardhan, our Chairperson.
It seems that the Indian General Elections 2024 are over.
I am in no position to discuss who's making the next government.
However, let's discuss the upcoming Union Government's key priorities from a core policy and technology policy perspective.
1️⃣ Coordinate with State Governments across party lines to ensure bureaucrats understand how core policy tasks and core policy development is done. You cannot overrely on too many outsourced consultants from MNCs. The UK, Australia, France and even the US are examples of countries who clearly show they have not been particularly benefited by such consultants at a core policy level. That is completely different from hiring MNC consultants for non-policy work, such as bids, infrastructure work, key trade negotiations, etc.
2️⃣ On #ArtificialIntelligence, the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India has already taken over all AI Policy work. The next step should be that since MeiTY has already got a #DPDPA approved by the Parliament, once the data law is notified, the Government's sector-specific regulators must engage in technology standardisation before even obsessing around DPI. Achieving DPI is a separate governance enhancement task, and should be done with better constitutional priorities.
3️⃣ I have supported the Government of India for #DPDPA and the IT Rules 2021, and clearly avoided supporting the alarmist anti-legislative rhetoric against these two pieces of legislation only on this ground that the bureaucrats for a decade had failed to come up with a basic data protection rule. Now that a law is already in place, the Government must realise that merely hedging bets with big tech companies by showing the Indian demographic advantage would never help you in achieving technological sovereignty. You need to create sound regulations that make common sense, and if you can't regulate, at least enable a form of jurisprudence which is settling.
4️⃣ Unlike what most lawyers will tell you, you do not need to imitate technology regulations from any country just because that country is "developed" or has some economic/ trade metric. While reasonable abeyance to international trade regulations under WTO and having sensible cross-border technology law arrangements in data, tech transfer, AI etc., are required, a Government must be open to propose and work around building sustainable and innovative approaches to regulate any technology. Or if you feel that the judicial system and the regulatory bodies are not ready to regulate or adjudicate tech respectively yet, initiate standardisation, take feedback.
Everyone is experimenting around tech regulation in most areas except some contentious and obvious areas like privacy, data quality, consent management and others.
I wish best to the upcoming government, and Indic Pacific Legal Research LLP and the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law would be glad to cooperate and advocate for India's interest.