Meet India’s new I&B Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

New Delhi: Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has been given the additional charge of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. 

He has also retained electronics and IT portfolio where he spearheaded the enactment of the crucial Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Vaishnaw has also retained the railway ministry.

In the previous Cabinet, the I&B Ministry was with Anurag Thakur, who has been re-elected as a Member of Parliament from Himachal Pradesh's Hamirpur.

An IIT Kanpur alumni, the bureaucrat-turned-politician has had an action-packed stint in the Modi 2.0 government and will need to build on the past momentum which is crucial to make India's electronic and IT sector 'Atmanirbhar' (self-reliant).

The 53-year-old Rajya Sabha member from Odisha was appointed as deputy secretary in the office of former prime minister Atal  Bihari Vajpayee in 2002 when the BJP had an alliance with the BJD.

During his brief stint in the PMO in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, his efforts to push for the public-private partnership model in infrastructure projects were appreciated.

Later, Vaishnaw, a native of Rajasthan, was appointed as Vajpayee’s private secretary after the BJP-led NDA lost the elections in 2004.

The BJP leader, an alumnus of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, was first elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha in 2019 and renominated unopposed to the Upper House of Parliament in February this year with active support from Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD).

After quitting the government jobs, he joined the private sector and worked in Gujarat during which he is believed to have drawn the attention of Modi, who was then the chief minister of the western state.

In July 2021, his induction to the Narendra Modi cabinet 2.0 was a surprise to many when he was entrusted with the responsibility for important portfolios like railways, communications electronics and information technology.

Mobile phone manufacturing during Vaishnaw's tenure crossed Rs 4.1 lakh crore worth of production mark, which is a 21-fold jump in production level compared to that in 2014-15 when 98% of local demand was met through imports. The country now meets 97% of its total mobile phone demand locally.

Among the pending issues, Vaishnaw would have to work out the enabling rules to implement the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act and also give shape to the proposed Digital India Act, which will supersede the two-decades-old IT Act.

The DPDP Act was approved by Parliament in August last year after six years of the Supreme Court declaring the 'Right to Privacy' as a fundamental right and has provisions to curb the misuse of individuals' data by online platforms.

The DPDP Act has the provision to set up an independent Data Protection Board (DPB), which will provide similar access to justice to people across the country.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) has been working on the draft Digital India legislation that would provide guard rails and prescribe regulatory approaches for new-age technologies like artificial intelligence.

The proposed DIA would also be crucial as it seeks to provide safeguards against newer forms of cyber crimes, including deepfakes, catphishing, doxing, cyber trolling etc.

Before heading for the 2024 general elections, the Modi 2.0 government has approved an allocation of over Rs 10,300 crore for the IndiaAI Mission to bolster India's AI ecosystem.

Vaishnaw emerged as one of the most successful Railway ministers for several initiatives, one of them being the introduction of 98 semi-high-speed Vande Bharat trains.

The first pair of Vande Bharat trains was launched in February 2019 and today, according to the Railway Ministry, 102 trains are running across the country with an overall occupancy of 105.7 per cent.