Seven States stream in to a sea of open data

An app for mandi prices of vegetables? A toilet tracker app? What next?

Heaven knows, but the government’s open data portal data.gov.in is transforming the world of information and its use by citizens.

There are literally terabytes – or maybe exabytes or zettabytes – of information available on the site. From the trivial to the high value, all kinds of data are continuously uploaded by 107 chief data officers (these are senior bureaucrats who have been nominated to be data evangelists) from 98 government departments.

Now, the States too are joining the open data revolution that the Centre set in motion in 2012. The idea is to offer data in a format that is readable and downloadable by all, free to use and reuse so that it helps social scientists, researchers, ordinary citizens – literally anyone looking for information.

More in line According to Neeta Verma, Deputy Director-General of the National Informatics Centre, which manages the portal, seven States, including Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Meghalaya, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka have joined the platform by sharing some data sets. Two more – Sikkim and Telangana – have expressed interest. “The States are coming in on their own. We have left it to them on the way they want to join,” she says.

As Verma explains, data.gov.in is a cloud-driven portal – so if States want to create their own unique sites they don’t have to spend on infrastructure but will be able to generate a URL of their own – and open it on the cloud. “We are developing a SAAS (software as a service) to facilitate that,” she says. However, the States will need to comply with common basic standards for uploading the data. “There has to be interoperability,” explains Verma.

Applications aplenty In the three years that the open data experiment of the government has been on, it has unlocked a wealth of information – from census data to live agriculture market prices to healthcare performance data – that people are using in ingenuous ways.

For instance, Arghyam, a charitable foundation funded by Rohini Nilekani, has created a toilet tracker app using the data uploaded by the Ministry of Water and Sanitation.

Or take the way Edwin Varghese, a former IBM employee, launched created an app, Mandi Trades, that connects farmers with traders. Varghese who is planning to scale up his start ups, says Mandi Trades has benefitted 15,000 farmers so far.

Interestingly, Verma says crime data is among the most searched – the site breaks down data down to every police station.

Consulting companies and researchers are big users as are open data entrepreneurs who have created start-ups from this free flowing data.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) conducts hackathons to get students and entrepreneurs to use the data innovatively.

Pleased at the way the portal is being used – people have downloaded data 2.05 million times – Verma is urging ministries to share more and put their most valuable data, what she refers to as five-star data, first. “The challenge is we are sitting on so much data but don’t know which is the most relevant for citizens. So we even have an option for citizens to suggest which data they want,” she says.

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