CII asks EU to accept India as 'Data Secure' nation

Urges early signing of India-EU trade pact

Indian industry under the aegis of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) today urged an early signing of the free trade agreement between India and the European Union (EU) even as it asked EU to recognize India as ‘Data Secure’ country.

During a meeting between members of parliament from India and EU, CII asked the 27-nation trading bloc to grant the much-awaited status to India. It also highlighted the fact that so far there has not been a single case of breach of data against India IT firms.

EU has said that in absence of dedicated data protection laws, it would not be in a position to recognize India as a data secure nation and therefore cannot transfer personal data to India. Indian government had been insisting on obtaining the status from EU through various global forums.

In 2010, EU had released an analytical report to identify the methodology adopted in securing sensitive personal data in India.

Under the report EU had expressed its dissatisfaction and not recommended India to be granted the status. India has said that it has enacted the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules 2011 to implement parts of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008, which the EU finds inadequate.

“India’s IT industry is of $100 million and provides services to all major corporate giants of world. Till date not a single case of data breach has been reported against Indian IT companies,” CII said in a statement.

However, during today’s meeting, EU’s ambassador to India, Joao Cravinho said that this particular issue cannot be dealt under the ambit of trade negotiations since this is a legislative issue.

The talks for having a bilateral trade deal with EU started in 2007 but it has failed to reach any conclusion so far. This is because of the differences on both sides over market access for goods and services.

The EU delegation was led by Graham Watson including eight other senior members of the European Parliament. While from India, the meeting was represented by Kalikesh Narayan and Rashid Alvi from Congress and Tarun Vijay and Kailash Joshi from BJP.

The crucial issue of EU’s demand to get more market access in India’s automobiles’ industry was also discussed.

“The EU members said that though access for automobiles is on the top of their agenda they were willing to work out a balanced outcome. They proposed to build a supply chain across the two regions particularly in some key sectors of interest to both sides,” the statement said.

The meeting was also attended by senior representatives of TATA, WIPRO, Lupin and Araina enterprises and sectoral bodies like Automotive Component Manufacturers’ Association (ACMA) and Nasscom.