Looking at the cross-border data flow regime in the DPDP Bill 2022

According to a 2019 report of India's ministry of electronics and information technology, India's digital economy could reach $1 trillion by 2025. Section 17 of the new draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 will allow businesses to store data in "trusted jurisdictions," which the central government will later specify on a "whitelist" based on their evaluation. This may make the cross-border data flow eco-system uncertain and unstable thus, proving counter-productive to ease-of-doing business as envisaged. For example, when the RBI issued a data localisation policy in April 2018 requiring all payment system data to be stored in India, it raised concerns about how cross-border data transfers in FTAs would be treated differently in so far as banking/finance transaction data are concerned. Therefore, the overarching objective should be to establish a global institution or to use the World Trade Organization's existing frameworks with enforcement authority over member states to establish a principle-based global order in cross-border data flow.