The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), India, published a draft data policy on February 21 which states all data collected, generated, and stored by every government ministry and the department will be open and shareable, excluding certain exceptions.

“Draft India Data Accessibility & Use Policy 2022”, published by MeitY prescribes that a regulatory authority called the Indian Data Council (IDC) and an agency named India Data Office (IDO) will oversee framing metadata standards and enforcement, respectively.

To promote innovation, minimally processed datasets will be made available at no cost. At the same time, certain datasets that have undergone value addition or transformation may be valued appropriately by the concerned Departments or Ministries. Any data sharing will happen within the legal framework of India. This will help in preventing the misuse of data and assure security, integrity, and confidentiality of the data.

IDO will be set up by MeitY with an objective to streamline and consolidate data access and sharing of public data repositories across the government and other stakeholders. Every ministry/department will have data management units headed by Chief Data Officers, who will work closely with IDO for ensuring the implementation of the data accessibility and use policy.

All data owned by the government, ministry, the organisation shall be open and shareable by default, unless the data is categorised under the negative list of datasets or falls under the restricted category and will be shared with only trusted users, as defined by the ministry.

All government/ministries will identify all existing data assets and create detailed, searchable data inventories with clear metadata and data dictionaries. The government will integrate all data portals maintained by ministries and other departments through APIs with the open government data portal. 

The IDC will create an indicative framework for identifying high-value datasets. HVD will be defined on their degree of importance in the market, degree of socio-economic benefits, impact on India’s AI strategy and performance on global indices.