Kris Gopalakrishnan-led panel to design governance framework for business data

The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) last week constituted a committee headed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan to look into a governance framework for community data and identifying its economic application. 

The government has been deliberating the move for a while in order to deal with data concerning businesses outside the Personal Data Protection Bill which is close to being finalised. 

The community data bucket will include aggregated data points, derived data, anonymous data, ecommerce data and data for training artificial intelligence tools. Creating a separate set of guidelines for the regulation of non-personal data also strengthens the government’s plan on keeping ecommerce related data out of the Personal Data Protection Bill. 

The seven-member committee includes representatives from the department for promotion of industry and internal trade (DPIIT), industry bodies, subject experts and advocacy groups.

“Access to and control over various kinds of data is critical for economic advantage. It is also seen that privately collected digital data could be a necessary requirement for policy making, governance and public service delivery in many areas,” said the memorandum issued by MeitY for the formation of the committee.

Previously, guidelines on storage and regulation of ecommerce data was a part of the draft national ecommerce policy of DPIIT and then transferred to MeitY. 

MeitY had sought feedback from select stakeholders in August on anonymising ecommerce business data and whether it should be included in the draft data protection bill.