The authorities on Monday printed a draft data policy for public session, which says all data collected, generated, and saved by each authorities ministry and division might be open and shareable barring sure exceptions.
Also, detailed datasets which have undergone worth addition could possibly be monetised by the federal government.
The policy doc, referred to as “Draft India Data Accessibility & Use Policy 2022”, prescribes {that a} regulatory authority referred to as the Indian Data Council (IDC) and an company by the identify India Data Office (IDO) will oversee framing metadata requirements and enforcement, respectively.
While the IDC will comprise the IDO and data officers of 5 authorities departments, the IDO might be constituted by the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology (MeitY) to streamline and consolidate data entry and sharing public data repositories throughout the federal government and different stakeholders.
The IDC’s duties will embody defining frameworks for defining high-value datasets, finalising data requirements and metadata requirements, and reviewing the implementation of the policy. The nomination of departments and state governments within the IDC might be by rotation with a tenure of two years for one division.
According to the draft policy, stakeholders like start-ups, different enterprises, people and researchers will have the ability to entry enriched data by data licensing, sharing, and valuation inside the frameworks of data safety and privateness.
“The core objective of this policy seems to be purely revenue generation. It lacks clarity on a number of things such as how a high-value dataset will be defined. We all have seen what happened when the government tried to sell vehicular registration data and the policy had to be rolled back because of misuse,” mentioned Apar Gupta, govt director on the Internet Freedom Foundation.
According to the policy framework, every central ministry/division will undertake and publish its domain-specific metadata and data requirements.
“These standards would be compliant with the interoperability framework, policy on open standards, institutional mechanisms for formulation of domain-specific metadata and other relevant guidelines published on the e-gov standards portal,” the doc states.
Also, data requirements that reduce throughout domains might be finalised by the IDC and, as soon as executed, adopted by all authorities ministries and departments involved.
Although a background doc for the draft policy talks in regards to the Personal Data Protection Bill and Non-Personal Data Protection Framework, the draft policy doesn’t clearly state how areas of it overlap, like how the consent and anonymisation of a person’s data that resides with the federal government might be handled, say consultants.
“If one goes by various reports, the government might be contemplating scrapping the data protection Bill itself in its current form, which, after the Joint Parliamentary Committee report in December, would have needed to include a non-personal data protection framework also,” mentioned Salman Waris, a associate at Delhi-based legislation agency TechLegis.
“The government’s efforts are towards monetisation, which itself follows from the NITI Aayog’s thinking that all non-personal data is national resource. This policy may also see a big pushback from big tech firms as their business models are based on monetising this kind of large-scale data,” he added.
The draft policy additionally seems to supply for the timeframe of the federal government holding datasets.
It says: “Each central ministry or department shall define its data retention period for specific datasets and ensure compliance with the same while managing storage and sharing of datasets.”
“A broad set of guidelines would be standardised and provided to help ministries and departments define their data retention policy,” it provides.
“We welcome the initiative by the federal government to hunt public feedback on the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy, 2022, which goals to boost data entry to startups by mechanisms reminiscent of data licensing, develop metadata requirements, in addition to prescribe norms for data safety and privateness,” mentioned Kazim Rizvi, founding father of policy thinktank The Dialogue.