MEITY has released the Draft India Accessibility and Use Policy, 2022 (“Draft Policy”) in order to harness the public sector data and to allow the licensing & sale of public data by the government to the private sector.
This Draft Policy will be applicable to all the data and information which is created / generated / collected / archived by the central government and the authorized agencies and will be open and shareable unless it falls under a negative list of datasets which cannot be shared. The Draft Policy defines the term negative list as, the list of data assets deemed nonshareable by ministries / departments; Data sets that are confidential in nature and / or are in the interest of the country’s security in not opening to the public.
The Draft Policy proposes the establishment of India data office (IDO) to streamline and unify data access and sharing among government and other stakeholders. and chief data officer as assigned by each ministry / department will work closely with such IDO;
The Data Policy further provides that the data as generated, created, collected, or stored by the central government and authorised agencies shall remain the property of such agency / department / ministry / entity which generated / collected it.
It is also proposed that an indicative framework will be notified by India data council on high value datasets. These high value datasets will be defined on their degree of importance in the market, degree of social economic benefits, etc.
As per the Draft Policy, data which has been processed minimally will be available at no cost in order to promote innovation and research & development but the data which had undergone value addition / transformation, the value will be decided by the concerned department. However, to enable fair price discovery, India data office will issue licensing frameworks and valuation models which can be used by the concerned departments.
This Draft Policy recognises the non-personal data as a valuable resource as it notes that India’s ambition to achieve $5 trillion economy is dependent on its ability to harness data. However, there are various issues in the Draft Policy which needs to be addressed before coming into the force such as how the centre and state are going to share the money from
the sale of the data under this Draft Policy, how it will deal with the privacy concerns with regards to dealing with the data in the absence of a robust data protection law in India, etc.
Please click here to read the draft policy.
