A country of over 1.3 billion people with rapid technological growth, India is a data goldmine waiting to be tapped into. The Indian government is trying to do so with Digital India, a flagship mission that seeks to transform the country into a world-leading knowledge economy. Having missed out on previous economic and technological revolutions, there is a pressure to leverage India’s position as a data-rich country to power development of the AI ecosystem. Succeed with data, and India will be well-placed for the fourth industrial revolution. Giving domestic corporations the power to access open data is also a way to power domestic innovation: thie can divest power from Big Tech, making it harder for the major players to monopolise data collection and value in the digital ecosystem.
Digital India adopts a nine pillar approach to digitising India, with one dedicated to enhancing “information for all”. The vision is that of transparency and easy access — swathes of public information in open formats, usable by all. Policy frameworks already in place, such as the National Data Sharing and Access Policy (NDSAP), and programs like the government’s open data platform, fall under this pillar of Digital India.
However, these initiatives suffer from a number of gaps. The NDSAP is just a policy document, meaning it doesn’t have the statutory power of a law. The NDSAP also doesn’t have a mechanism that ensures datasets are published fully or in a timely fashion. Without a guiding law, government departments already straining with a lack of capability often adhere to the policy pro forma.As a result, datasets on the open government portal frequently have many issues — they may be poorly standardised, not provided in open formats, incomplete, outdated, or lack proper annotation and metadata. The NDSAP framework hasn’t implemented processes to make republishing and reusing data easy. The government has recently proposed a National Data Governance Framework Policy. This seeks to promote data-driven governance and catalyse a start-up ecosystem in India by providing access to data sets containing non-personal data that have been collected and curated by the government. The framework envisages a new data portal to make government data accessible both to government entities, as well as companies and researchers, on a permissioned basis.
