Government to unveil National Data Governance Policy

Published: 3rd Feb, 2023

Context

While announcing the Union Budget for year 2023-24, the Finance minister has mentioned that the government is going to unveil National Data Governance Policy to enable access to anonymized data to start-ups in order to boost development.

Background

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a draft of this policy in May 2022 for public consultation.
An expert committee report submitted to MeitY on whether a company can be classified as a “data business” based on certain parameters, the type and quantity of data collected after which anonymized data from these firms can be obtained by a community.

Who can acquire data?

Any group of people who are bound by common interests and objectives. An example of non-personal data sharing is general traffic data in a city from ridesharing apps.

About

Objective:
- It will aim to ensure greater citizen awareness, participation, and engagement with open data, increase the availability of datasets of national importance, and identify datasets suitable for sharing and improve overall compliance to secure data sharing and privacy policies and standards.
Key features:
- A core component of the data governance framework will be the formation of an India Data Management Office (IDMO) under the IT ministry.
- The anonymized datasets will be offered as part of the India datasets programmes to the AI (artificial intelligence) ecosystem, which will be a kinetic enabler for the digital economy.
- It will lay out some guidelines for sharing of non-personal data by private entities

Significance:

Datasets that represent India’s consumers is a huge opportunity for the next generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.
The datasets will be provided for governance research, which even the government can use to create better targeted policies, more AI researchers can look at technology solutions.

How start-ups can be benefitted?

As part of the policy, the Indian government will also build the India Datasets program, which will consist of non-personal and anonymised datasets from Government entities that have collected data from Indian citizens or those in India.
Private entities will be encouraged to share such data.
For start-ups, ability to have access to anonymised data will be a phenomenal capability that really should help overall AI Machine Learning (AIML) research, outcomes, solutions, companies, everything becomes significantly better.

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