Two months after the Indian government introduced draft guidelines for Data Anonymization in July, the Indian government decided to pull down the norms on September 6. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on August 30 invited discussions over the guidelines. The development comes days after the government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2021, last month.

As per a report by The Economic Times, the guidelines have been pulled down for wider consultation with experts and other government departments. On September 2, the government put up the guidelines for public consultation, and the deadline for the submissions of comments was September 21. 

Under the data anonymization guidelines, the government had been planning to include all e-governance projects with an aim to enhance the privacy of individuals by either removing or minimizing the identifiability of individuals in large data sets, which contain large datasets.  

The draft includes various techniques and guidelines for e-commerce projects in order to anonymize the data. The draft was prepared by MeitY, the Standardization Testing Quality Certification (STQC) Directorate and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).