Relevance: GS-2: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation; Important aspects of governance, transparency and accountability, e-governance- applications.

Key Phrases: Draft data policy, MeitY, G2G data Sharing, processed data, data-based governance, data minimisation, High-Value Data Sets, Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021.

Why in News?

• Union government has released a draft data policy this week, ‘India Data Accessibility and Use Policy’, for feedback and inputs from the public.

Key Points:

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) came out with a draft policy that proposes a framework for government-to-government data sharing and moots that all data for every government department or its organisation shall be open and sharable by default, with certain riders.
• Simply put, this is about generating non-personal data like traffic data which can be anonymised to build an AI algorithm which Google or Uber-like companies are already using to alert where are the congestion or which is the best route to take.
• It will be applicable to all data and information created, generated and collected by the government directly or through ministries, departments and authorised agencies.
• The ‘Preamble’ of the policy states that “India’s ambition of becoming a 5 trillion-dollar digital economy depends on its ability to harness the value of data”.
  • This objective can be traced back to the 2018-19 Economic Survey, which contained an entire chapter on transforming citizen data into a public good for revenue generation.
  • The Survey noted that since such data is generated and belongs to the people, it should be used for the people.
  • The survey had also noted that private sector could be granted access to “select databases” for commercial use.
• The draft policy also proposes to make available certain data for the purpose of R&D and innovation.
  • Minimally processed data sets shall be made available at no cost to promote innovation and R&D — for restricted access data sharing as per the licensing model adopted.
  • Pricing of data sets will be decided by the owner/government department or agency and must be notified in a transparent manner.

Significance:

• The government’s draft on the ‘India Data Accessibility and Use Policy’ is a move aimed to ensure more effective data-based governance paradigms for better and more broad-based governance.
• According to MeitY, the objective of the policy is to “radically transform” India’s ability to harness public sector data for large scale social transformation.
• To build artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for the country, access to government open data is very critical. India cannot build AI ambitions without data.
  • But, privacy has to be at the heart of it, cannot compromise any individual’s privacy.
• The draft has been evolved in consultation with various stakeholders including academia, industry, and government, and currently is put up for public consultation.

Concerns:

• The proposed policy could also be opening the doors for government mining individual’s data.
• Creation of an economic incentive for data collection and storage may encourage the government to go against settled best practices such as the principle of data minimisation, which states that data collection should be limited to only that which is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish the specified purpose of the collection.
  • As a result, data collection may be carried out simply for the sake of collection of maximum data to correspondingly maximise revenue generation.
  • It could also compromise on the exercise of due diligence by the government in its capacity as an intermediary.
• This policy, if implemented in the current form, without enabling legislative framework, could open up issues of violation of citizen’s data privacy and personal privacy.
• Here, even the Draft Data Protection Bill, 2021 will not be a sufficient safeguard as it provides wide exemptions to the government as it stands.
• As a result, the Policy fails to fulfill the threshold of legality put in place by the Supreme Court in the right to privacy decision, which states that any invasion into privacy by the state must be on the basis of an anchoring legislation.
• Experts have also flagged concerns around the lack of proper standards and framework on data anonymisation, and said that it is possible that such data may be “reverse-engineered”, thereby making re-identification of the generators of the data very easy.
• Moreover, experts suggest that issues of cyber security have not been addressed by the policy.
• This policy, could have a direct conflict with the provisions of the Indian cyber law and the rules and regulations made there under.
• Lack of clear & concise definitions for key concepts: For Example, The Policy creates a separate category of ‘High-Value Data Sets’ which it deems essential for governance and innovation, access to which will be accelerated.
  • However, nowhere in the Background Note or the Policy has the category been concisely defined.
• The policy, could also face pushback from big tech companies whose business model is based on the monetisation of large-scale data collection model, similar to the one proposed by the IT ministry.

Way Forward:

• The draft has suggested setting up of a central India Data Office will be created under MeitY, while all the central government’s line ministries will have to form their respective Data Management Unit, which will be headed by a Chief Data Officer.
  • These chief data officers along with the India Data Officer will together form the India Data Council, which will decide on the policy matters of data accessibility and its usage.
• The draft also proposes a data sharing toolkit, which will be the broad umbrella to help respective central or state government ministries and departments “assess and optimally manage” the risks associated with the release and sharing of such data.
• Given the fact that India is already coming up with a new Personal Data Protection law, it would have been much better to have waited for the new law, before bringing out such a policy.

Source: The Hindu BL

Mains Question:

Q. When it starts selling citizen’s data, even if anonymised, the government gets into business of making money. In this light examine critically the proposed draft ‘India Data Accessibility and Use Policy’.