New Delhi, Nov. 3 -- Last week, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) released a new framework aimed at breaking the "data deadlock" and democratizing data access to build artificial intelligence (AI) models. This new "Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for AI Training" framework purports to enable responsible data sharing while ensuring privacy, transparency and trust.

I am not convinced it will achieve its aims. Not only is this not a novel architecture, it seems to subvert much of what India's DEPA was designed to achieve. Decisions around what can be done with personal data, which under DEPA were placed in the hands of the data principal, will now be taken by the institutions that hold that d...