Draft data accessibility and use policy

Context:

Recently the Ministry of electronics and information technology released the draft India data accessibility and use policy for public consultation.
The draft aims at providing a mechanism for harnessing the public data, this data can be used for various purposes such as public services and other digital transactions.

The draft largely concentrates on non-personal data that is available with the public sector.
This policy seeks to harness this data for data-based intelligence governance and economic development.
The core principle of the draft policy is bringing in public participation and bring in awareness among the public.
One of the core objective of the draft policy which is mentioned is the open data which will be available in the open forum.
This raises few concerns about the privacy of the individuals given the threat of cyber security it poses a ethical and procedural dilemma to balance the risk of data miss use.
The draft policy assumes that just with anonymized Data that the privacy of the individuals will be protected.
Even in the case of anonymous citizens data downstream processing can pose serious risks to the privacy of the citizens.
Considering that India has no personal data protection law this draft policy becomes problematic.

This draft policy says that the owners of the nonpersonal data will be the government which is against the Twenty20 report of the MEITY committee of experts on non-personal data governance.
This committee was of the opinion that the ownership of this non-personal data should be on trusteeship basis.

In the present situation it is the private sector that holds the large and most valuable data resources.
So it is a challenge for the state to bring in Socio economic innovation for the ease of governance.
In this context we can quote the example of European union where it has pooled in Common set of resources focusing on a few sectors.
This data can be used in areas such as health energy agriculture and other public sectors.

There is a need for a new social contract for data where the social comments of data is governed as a common thing that belongs to all citizens.
The government is the custodian or the trustee which shall take the responsibility to promote the usage of data for public good.
It is necessary to ensure that the data and other aspects related to it shall be democratized through a accountable institutional mechanism.

Source: THE HINDU.