In the mood for data sharing

Open government data (OGD) is fashionable. Governments and public institutions in Europe and other parts of the globe are making increasing numbers of datasets available to the public by means of national, regional, local or thematic portals, in keeping with their political commitments towards open government and open data. At the global level, OGD is an important part of the Open Government Partnership, an international initiative launched in September 2011 by eight founding governments.

The demand for such data —“give us our data back” — has not arisen out of nowhere. There is at least one law, the Right to Information Act, which complements and creates an environment for such data demands in India.

Section 2 (f) of the RTI Act very broadly defines “information” as any material in any form, including records, documents, memos, e-mails, opinions, advices, press releases, circulars, orders, logbooks, contracts, reports, papers, samples, models, data material held in any electronic form. While the RTI is mostly rights-based, OGD is mostly technology-driven.

The recent focus of national government on OGD in India may ‘distract’ its attention from providing accessible information to the general public in favour of making data portals for developers, entailing a possible new information power for the latter. In addition, the emphasis on proactive dissemination of OGD may actually have a negative influence on the demand-side of RTI. It is therefore felt by the Government that efficient sharing of data — among data owners and inter-and-intra governmental agencies along with data standards and interoperable systems — is the need of the hour.

So, the Government in 2012 formulated a policy on National Data Sharing and Accessibility (NDSAP), which could provide an enabling provision and platform for proactive and open access to the data generated through public funds available with various ministries/departments/bodies of the Government. The objective is to facilitate access to government-owned shareable data (along with its usage information) in machine-readable form through a wide area network all over the country in a periodically updatable manner.

This would be within the framework of various related policies, acts and rules of the Government of India, thereby permitting a wider accessibility and usage by public.

The principles on which data sharing and accessibility need to be based include: openness, flexibility, transparency, quality, security and machine-readability. As per policy, each department has to prepare its Negative List. The datasets which are confidential and are in the interest of the country’s security would fall into the negative list.

By and large, Government data are generated through the processes and events of primary data (population census, education census, economic survey, etc.), processed/value-added data (budget, planning, etc.) and data generated through delivery of government services (income tax collection, MNREGA wage distribution, etc).

The implementation plan for the NDSAP involves the Department of Science and Technology serving the nodal functions of coordination and monitoring. The challenges of the OGD are far too many in India. The first and foremost is the involvement of several agencies in the implementation. Keeping in view the data generation and data sharing a low priority sector in India, the coordination among all these agencies seems to be fallible.

This will also result in loss of time which will ultimately affect the timeliness principle of data sharing. Further, one of the purposes of the OGD is to guarantee accountability, and too many agencies would dilute their accountability in cases of default.

The issues of privacy and confidentiality are other areas of concern. Representatives of government agencies often fear that citizens may use raw data irresponsibly and an incorrect analysis of data may lead to misconceptions and may hurt business or larger public interests. Hence, many data suppliers are cautious about releasing any data in the public domain. There are concerns about sensitive information, as there have been past instances of confidential information finding its way into the websites and reports sold by data intermediaries. For example the data set on household surveys and the data regarding the Annual Survey of Industries owned by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation fall in this category.

As per the policy of NDSAP, each department has to prepare its Negative List. The datasets which are confidential and are in the interest of the country’s security would fall into the list. All other datasets would be in the Open List. Thereafter, within a year all the datasets need to be published on the data portal, data.gov.in and within the first three months at least five high-value datasets need to be published.

The experience of the Central Information Commission (CIC) regarding compliance with its full bench order of November 15, 2010, in which the public authorities of the central government were directed to dichotomise negative and positive classes of information, can be discouraging. Even though the order of the Commission has the force of law, its non-compliance even after three years can dampen the identification of data sets by various departments, as NDSAP does not have any force of statute.

The portal allows citizens and users to place a request for a certain dataset online. Once the number of requests for a dataset crosses 100, NIC officially writes to the department concerned requesting it to provide that data. While this is a good practice where citizens can directly influence the data availability, it is important for the data portal and its implementing agencies to seek data in a structured manner.

The biggest problem is the supply deficit of data. For example, data demand for many social indicators are well known, however, there has not been much sincere effort by the Government to generate such data.

There is need for improving quality of government data through better record keeping, improving coordination between government departments and reducing multiple departments and personnel providing similar data is another challenge for data governance in the country.

Even though the OGD faces many challenges, it has put a variety of data in a readily accessible and machine-readable format. While NDSAP implementing agencies and the project unit are largely responsible for uploading data in open data formats, there needs to be a system in place to review the contents of data portal from time to time.

The writer is a civil servant, currently on sabbatical. The views are personal