The Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presents the Union Budget 2023-24 in the Lok Sabha on February 1, 2023 in New Delhi. Photo Credit: PTI
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “To promote innovation and research by start-ups and academics, a National Data Governance Policy will be brought in.” presentation of the union budget 2023-24 on 1st February.
“This will enable access to anonymised data,” she said.
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Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released Draft Policy For public consultation in May 2022. The nine-page document sought to set up an India Data Management Office (IDMO) under the Digital India Corporation and frame certain guidelines for sharing of non-personal data by private entities. The concept of sharing non-personal data is different from Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022Which was designed with online personal privacy in mind.
Under the more detailed December 2020 draft framework, an expert committee report submitted to MeitY on whether a company can be classified as a “data business” based on certain parameters, the type and quantity of data collected After which anonymized data from these firms can be obtained by a community, defined as “any group of people who are bound by common interests and objectives”. An example of non-personal data sharing is general traffic data in a city from ridesharing apps.
That year, the US-India Business Council (USIBC) reportedly raised concerns with tech giants such as Amazon and Google opposing the scale of data sharing that MeitY’s committee of experts had recommended.
In a 2021 report funded by Google, Aapti Institute, a technology policy think tank, said the mandatory data sharing outlined in the 2020 report was “premature” in the “nascent” Indian data economy. “The state must serve to bring stakeholders together by adopting a consultative and iterative approach to data governance to harness the vast and latent potential of non-personal data,” the report said.
The May 2022 draft does not provide for mandatory data sharing, and instead provides high-level principles on the basis of which subsequent non-personal data sharing arrangements will be implemented.
‘Time to move on’
At a press conference on Wednesday, Union Minister for Railways, Communications and Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnav said that the government wanted to wait for a personal data protection law before implementing a non-personal data policy. “That is why, now that the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill is already in place, it has received a very good response. The industry and all stakeholders have accepted this,” Mr Vaishnav said. “So with these two complementary constructs, it is time to move on.”
Mr Vaishnav also said the policy would only cover datasets that are held by the government, a possible relief to big tech companies that have expressed concern over mandatory data sharing with potential competitors. “I would like to say very clearly that the National Data Governance Framework policy deals with non-personal data available with the government, and these are non-personal data, for example- weather data [and] climate data,” Mr Vaishnav said.