Digital India Act: Unravelling regulatory tangles in e-commerce space

Ambitious proposal for an overarching Digital India Act that aims to improve ease of doing business for rapidly expanding sector likely to face challenges of overlapping ministerial responsibilities

There are 11 sets of laws and rules hovering over the information technology business landscape in India, excluding media laws. Together they can be maddening for the fast-growing business of e-commerce, which is why Minister of State for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrashekhar has proposed combining them into one, the Digital India Act (DIA).

In a presentation to the stakeholders on March 24, the minister suggested that once this law was in place, DIA would be part of a four-pillar landscape of which the other three will be the Indian Telecommunication Bill, the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill and the National