The Centre will soon notify a policy that will allow apps and services to be created for commercial purposes using over 42,000 databases. This will remove the restriction on their use solely for academic purposes.
The Open Government Data Platform publishes datasets collected by various Ministries and departments, including Agriculture, Union Budget, Transport and Commerce.
“The government generates so much data. A lot of people can use them. For example, Census data are used by academics, companies, students and politicians. Data are a very important resource,” Ajay Kumar, Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT said.
India has chosen, he said, to make public a lot of government data, giving it a place among the top 10 countries that have an open data platform.
“Earlier, we permitted their use only for academic or government purposes. We recently took a decision to allow people to create value added services for commercial purposes,” he said.
One example is in transport. On the basis of registration numbers, a mobile app can offer a user the facility to check details of a car, including previous owners. The data were available in the public domain, but someone would have to work on the set, use analytics and build a value added service.
“The policy change will be notified soon. It will allow anyone – private, government, academia or start-ups – to offer services,” Mr. Kumar said. The government will not charge for data but the provider may price the services.
Privacy filterOn privacy filtering, Mr. Kumar said Chief Data Officers (CDOs) in each Ministry maintain databases and initially decide what can be put out in the public domain. “No data that put a citizen’s privacy at risk were published ,” he said.
Mr. Kumar said it was a challenge for the IT Ministry to convince other Ministries, which are typically secretive, to publish more data.
