Comments on the National Cyber Security Strategy for India (NCSS 2020)

Prafulla Sahu, Director-General, Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law

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Presenting our comments submitted to the Indian Government as a due suggestion to the NCSS 2020, for which the Government of India requested to the public:

• The Cyberspace policy must be knowledge-driven & must be congruent and coherent to the physic of Indian cultural values

• There must be some ethical scalability and the constitutional foresight of the organs of the Central and State Governments especially a better and prudent expectancy from judicial and executive authorities so as to keep a technologically mandated and constituted separation of powers among the organs;

• The Policy must convene (1) a reasonable, coherent and inclusive legal crystallization of the revised cyber legal procedures implanted tested, affirmed and improved in the legal system of the Republic of India, which is a long-term process, and (2) swift and substantive legal reforms which are required to be scrutinized carefully in concern with the disruptive nature of such techno-social developments;

• Beyond the reasonability to improve the procedural components of third-world legal systems, the important conundrums in the policy which must be adequately taken into consideration with are (1) the basic structure of the law, (2) the precedential customs in judicial parliamentary and executive systems that decide the layer of constitutional morality in the systems; and (3) resistance and susceptibility towards unreasonable constitutional redemptions in such systems due to technological disruptions;

• Digital divide must be eliminated by imparting economically fair cyberspace for users within and throughout the jurisdiction of the Republic of India by the design of data governance architectures for the purpose of compliance and transparency;

• The Policy must be based on the mandate of respecting the provisions of Parts III to V-A of the Constitution of India. 1950 and the collateral jurisprudence declared by competent Courts and Tribunals via not applying the Market Economy Approach, where neoliberal economics divides human individual interests and overrides their seminal issues. Instead, the policy must contribute towards an entitative approach to understand human life to expand the definitive and applied enforcement of data protection rights of users who wish to enforce them fundamental and human rights in the domain of data protection;

• Technocratic governance is not preventable until the Republic of India, in lines with the D9 economies in North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe does not relinquish its sovereign imperative to employ innovative and nation-oriented resolutions in its policy so as to render and address the attached problems for users/data subjects in an Indian Cyberspace that are of special nature;

• There must be a federal policy for students, data practitioners and other professionals over imparting Al Education in line with an Indianised approach towards sustainable development in lines with India’s commitment towards the Sustainable Development Goals of 2030;

For any comment, do not hesitate to mail us at abhivardhan@isail.in, isaillige@gmail.com and directorate@isail.in.