The Ministry of Electronics and IT has released a bill on personal data protection, and invited public comments by the 30^th of September. Once passed, this bill will form the basis of how the digital information economy is regulated, by putting in place a framework for data protection. It will have far reaching implications for questions of politics, economy, borders and citizenship, that should be of concern not only to privacy activists.

The report accompanying the bill argues that prominent legal regimes of data protection are a reflection of citizen-state relationships in those jurisdictions, and that therefore, the present bill has been drafted in such a way as to reflect the relationship between the Indian State and the Indian citizen. Nayantara of the Internet Democracy Project will examine different parts of the bill to construct a snapshot of how this relationship is imagined by the drafting committee.