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The Centre will soon notify a policy on ‘open data’ to put more data in the public domain, allowing individuals to build apps or services for commercial purposes.
The government generates a lot of data that many more people can actually use, said a senior official at the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology. For example, Census data is used by academics, companies, students and politicians.
“We permitted the use of this data only for academic or government purposes. But, recently we have taken a policy decision that we will allow people to create value-added services on a commercial basis,” the official told BusinessLine .
Data are an important resource. A lot of data with the government can be put in the public domain, he said, adding that the government has started the portal data.gov.in for such purposes and has chosen to put a lot of government data on this platform.
Over 42,000 databases“We have more than 42,000 databases on the platform presently. India is among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of putting out its data on the open data platform. So, people can conceive a large number of applications and services from this data. There are so many start-ups who can use this data,” the official said.
The policy change will allow anyone — private or government or academia — to offer value added services. “We (government) will not take any charges … a user who makes and offers the service may or may not charge for it,” he said.
The official said the Ministry would take a call on what data to put online.
“We have appointed Chief Data Officers in each ministry. Their job is to keep making databases and then see what we can put out in the public domain. We have trained them because it’s difficult to decide what information needs to be put out in public domain and what should not.”
Privacy issueAsked about privacy issues on sharing of such data, he said the government is only a custodian and the data belongs to the public.
“Obviously, data which are strategic, related to security, is different.
“We try to do one workshop every three months. We don’t put anything which has privacy issues,” he added.
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