Centre may bring new e-commerce policy in FY20

Panaji: Government may bring the e-commerce policy in the current fiscal though no timeline can be given, a senior official has said.

"The draft of e-commerce bill is out. We have just started stakeholder consultations. Many including Nasscom, CII have already given their feedback.

We are trying to bring it early since it is a very important policy, Guru Prasad Mohapatra, Secretary, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade said.

We are talking about commercial data here. There is a large number of e-commerce data. I cannot give a timeline, but we will target to bring it in the current fiscal, he added.

He was in Goa for the second edition of India Start up Summit, an initiative of the DPIIT. Mohapatra said the Data Privacy Bill of IT ministry is about privacy issues of personal data.

When asked if the e-commerce rules can be possible before the current fiscal?, "We are targeting something like that," he replied.

Recently IT ministry moved the data privacy bill in the union cabinet which was approved and where privacy of personal data has so far been included.

While the personal data of customers is protected by privacy laws across the world and also in the Indian Bill, non-personal data (NPD) remains largely unregulated.

NPD includes anonymised data like e-commerce data, climate trends collected by a weather app, or commuter patterns gathered by a cab aggregator, eating pattern of a particular region.