India’s Proposed Data Protection Law and an India-US Executive Agreement Under the CLOUD Act

Indian law enforcement agencies (LEAs) often cite challenges in accessing data from the United States’ service providers for criminal investigations. This is the reason cited by the Indian government for data localisation proposals.

The US CLOUD Act offers a path for foreign governments to access data stored with the US service providers. So far, the US has concluded agreements with the United Kingdom and Australia to allow their LEAs to directly access data from the US service providers.

Sreenidhi Srinivasan and Osho Chhel, in their paper, trace the US-UK negotiations, how the US assessed UK's laws, and the bottlenecks/compromises made to reach an agreement. Does the existing Indian legal system fulfil the CLOUD Act requirements? Will having a data protection law make it easier for India to enter into a CLOUD Act agreement?