The Indian Government seems to be moving from one controversial policy to another. After the huge fracas on the encryption policy and the great debacle on map data, the massively controversial encryption policy seems to be back on the drawing board of the government. According to information sourced from some highly placed sources, the Department of Electronics and IT has started its work on redrafting the policy, which was withdrawn in September 2015 after a huge public outcry within hours of making it public. The draft is at an initial stage now and is being drafted by the department jointly with the office of the national security adviser and it may take another two to three months to be ready.
According to certain people in the know, the idea behind the policy is to secure communication over the Internet for citizens by making certain encryption standards mandatory. The proposed encryption strength in India is 40 bit, which is based on the Telegraph Act made decades ago. The current need, according to experts, is for at least 256 bit. The encryption policy is to protect communication between the sender and receiver from being hacked into. Why should the conduit have any kind of access to it? The policy has to be absolutely crystal clear. Even if you look at encryption by WhatsApp, the government is in favour of it,” said a government official, who is aware of the plans but did not want to be named.
The Indian government was forced to withdraw the earlier draft of the encryption policy within 12 hours after making it public. It came under severe criticism, especially on the various social media, especially for its move to make individuals bound to retain their personal chats and messages on social networking sites like Facebook and WhatsApp for 90 days and thereby make it available to law authorities. The outcry even forced the government to clarify within a few hours that chats on social networking sites like Whatsapp and Facebook were being exempted from the policy. However, taking note of the continued outcry, the policy was finally withdrawn by Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.