India’s political leaders are set to re-introduce the oft-postponed Data Protection Law in the Budget session of the Parliament convening in February 2023, and while the contours of the bill are not
yet known, indications are that data localization is
going to be an integral part of it. If its most recent
version had become law, the Bill would have
mandated that companies store sensitive and critical personal information related to Indian
citizens on servers physically located in India.
While the Bill didn’t define what constitutes
critical personal information, it barred the transfer of “critical” personal information outside the country under any circumstance.
