At a pre-Budget meeting, the FM was asked to ensure that NBFCs come out of the liquidity crisis they are facing with the help of RBI. They also spoke about the futility of trying to achieve a 3 per cent fiscal deficit target over the medium term.
'If Indians are to be truly protected, Parliament must review and address these dangerous provisions before they become law.'
In the worst-case scenario, it will be next to impossible for tech companies like Amazon and Google to run any service that requires user biometrics.
Even with the possible expenditure roll-overs and off-budget financing, the fiscal deficit target will not be met. The FRBM Act, after its amendment in 2018, allows a fiscal deficit slippage of not more than 0.5 per cent for any given year, provided there are justifications. These justifications include war, national security, severe collapse in the agriculture sector, a major natural calamity, big structural economic reforms, or the decline in real output growth of a quarter by at least 3 percentage points below its average of the previous four quarters.
In platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Helo, and ShareChat, mediators have been asked to put in more hours to ensure that no communal or fake news spread.
People familiar with the proceedings said independent cybersecurity experts from a private consulting firm, technology lawyers, government officials and WhatsApp representatives were asked questions about the Pegasus spyware and the larger issues surrounding surveillance, hacking and remedial measures.
In the 2020-21 Budget, the prime minister and the finance minister are keen to stamp their narrative, after various rollbacks following the previous Budget, said top government sources. Besides the scheduled meetings, the sources said, the Prime Minister's Office is expected to hold several meetings with top secretaries and officials on various ongoing schemes, their performance and also how some of them could be tweaked for better results.
If the Personal Data Protection Bill gets passed in its present form, a new class of companies and entities could emerge. The sole job of these new entities would be to manage the consent for data usage of a user.Banks, healthcare firms and fintech companies, among others, fear that sharing non-personal data with the government may hurt business interests. Banks also fear the threat of data misuse.
The biggest fear many of the e-commerce firms have is the possible requirement to change business models overnight, which would drastically increase costs as well as disrupt businesses.
Oyo has recently undergone large-scale corporate restructuring, setting up several subsidiaries and bifurcating operations globally.
Fintech giant Paytm claimed it is selling more FASTags than all the banks put together on a daily basis.
Long-term capital gains tax may be scrapped and the burden of dividend distribution tax could perhaps be shifted from companies to shareholders. Also, the Budget could provide income tax relief for the salaried classes, while proposing tax sops for small, medium and micro enterprises.
In a communication to the ministry of electronics and information technology, the messaging service said it was committed to protecting the privacy of its over 400 million users in India.
Sources said the rural development ministry has sought an additional Rs 20,000 crore for MGNREGA for 2019-20 over and above the budgeted Rs 60,000 crore for 2019-20. Though, all of the PM-KISAN savings may not be transferred to fund MNGREGA's extra needs, sources said a part of this could be transferred.
This episode highlights that the country's surveillance systems are not robust enough to ward off and prevent such attacks in the future.
The delivery staff who drop off packages for online retail giants or food or ferry passengers around the city in their taxis are among the worst affected by the capital's foul air.
Recently, several Twitter users began migrating to the social networking platform after a protest that began with Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde's Twitter account suspension, and moved on to a larger conversation about Twitter's policies being allegedly anti-Dalit and certain castes and religion.
Top officials in key ministries, including finance and IT, are of the opinion that a sensitive payments system such as UPI should not be on a platform whose security is possibly compromised.
On October 29, WhatsApp announced it was suing NSO Group for selling its software, Pegasus, which has the ability to compromise a device and get access to all of a target's data. Spooked by revelations that activists and journalists were spied upon by using NSO Group's spyware, many have moved to alternative messaging platforms such as Signal and Telegram.
Home ministry sources say there are fears that international lobbies might have been involved in spying, to create a narrative around Indian governance as well as the economy.
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