MeitY’s shares India data accessibility and use draft policy: Here are top the recommendations

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has shared a draft of the data policy for public consultations. The draft policy called the India Data Accessibility and Use Policy ‘aims to enhance access, quality, and use of data, in line with the current and emerging technology needs of the decade’ and it is up for public consultations and feedback until March 18.

MeitY said that the draft of the India Data Accessibility and Use Policy has been evolved in consultation with various stakeholders including academia, industry, and government and it includes provision and it plans to turn India into a $5 trillion digital economy.

What does the draft data policy want to achieve ?

It aims to maximise the access to and use of quality public sector data, enhance efficiency of service delivery, protect citizen’s data security and privacy, promote transparency and accountability of data, promote data interoperability, and improve overall compliance of data sharing policies.

What does the draft data policy say?

— The draft data policy prescribes setting up of the India Data Office or the IDO that will streamline and consolidate data access and sharing of public data across government and other stakeholders. Under the new policy, every ministry and every department will have a Data Management Unit that will be headed by Chief Data Officers that will report to the IDO to implement the policy.

— The draft policy also prescribes setting up of the India Data Council consisting of India Data Officer and Chief Data Officers from government and state governments. “This shall include but not limited to defining frameworks for high value datasets, finalising data standards and metadata standards as also reviewing the implementation of the policy,” the draft policy said adding that the members of the India Data Council will be on a tenured rotation of two years. This council will be responsible for finalising data standards and metadata standards.

— The draft policy aims to make data open by default by making all the data for every ministry, governmental department and organisation open and shareable by default. It also makes provisions for restricting this data flow under special circumstances. The draft bill says that the data flow will be restricted if it is categorised under the negative list of datasets or if it is being restricted to be used by ‘trusted users’ under a ‘controlled environment’.

— All governmental ministries and departments have been directed to create searchable data inventories with distinct metadata and data dictionaries. All of these inventories will be federated into a government-wide searchable database for government-to-government data sharing to minimise data duplication.

— All government ministries and departments will adopt high value datasets (HVDs) to identify, publish and maintain their high-value data sets. MeitY via the IDO will advise ministries and departments to accelerate HVDs.

— The draft policy says that all minimally processed datasets shall be made freely available. “Only detailed data sets that have undergone value addition/transformation and quality for monetisation may be priced appropriately,” the draft policy said.

— The draft policy also suggests q pricing model for restricted access to datasets. “For restricted access data sharing, pricing of datasets as decided by the owner government department or agency must be notified in a transparent manner,” the policy said.

— Apart from the above mentioned details, the draft policy also talks about setting up standards for metadata and ensuring anonymization of data for maintaining data privacy. “Each central ministry and department shall adopt and publish its domain-specific metadata and data standards. These standards should be compliant with the interoperability framework, policy on open standards, institutional mechanism for formulation of domain-specific metadata and data standards and other relevant guidelines published on the e-govstandards portal,” the draft policy says.

— The policy also insists on maintaining a minimum amount of anonymisation with standards defined by MeitY and IDO.

— Furthermore, ministries and governmental ministries have been directed to define the time for which they retain specific datasets. “A broad set of guidelines would be standardised and provided to help ministries and departments define their data retention policy. These can be based on DQGI framework notified by NITI Aayog.

— The draft policy also makes provisions for upskilling government officials.

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