MeitY new Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy proposes framework to share data among government departments

The central government has published a draft data policy for public consultation that puts forth that all data created, collected, stored and generated by every government ministry and department will be open and sharable leaving out certain exceptions.  

The government is inviting feedback and inputs on the draft that aims to enhance access, quality, and use of data, in line with the current and emerging technology needs of the decade. 

This draft has been evolved in consultation with various stakeholders including academia, industry, and government. It is put up for public consultation. 

The last date of submission for inputs/feedback is March 18. 

The policy document called “Draft India Data Accessibilty & Use Policy 2022”, says that a regulatory authority called the Indian Data Council (IDC) and an agency named India Data Office (IDO) shall be set up by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) with an objective to streamline and put together data access and sharing of public data repositories across the government and other stakeholders. 

In the policy document, the MeitY says that an indicative framework for identifying high-value datasets (HVDs) will be notified by the India data council. HVDs will be defined based on their degree of importance in the market, degree of socio-economic benefits, impact on India’s AI strategy and performance on key global indices. 

Each central ministry/department shall adopt and publish its domain-specific metadata and data standards. These standards should be compliant with the interoperability framework, policy on open standards, Institutional Mechanism for Formulation of Domain specific Metadata and Data Standards and other relevant guidelines published on the e-gov standards portal. Data standards that cut across domains shall be finalized by India Data Council and once finalised adopted by all concerned government ministries/departments, the document said.