Aiming to harness data for effective decision-making, the Tamil Nadu government has formulated the Tamil Nadu Data Policy, 2022. It is expected to support policy-making, improve implementation of schemes, encourage value-added services, improve access to and quality of services.
A State-level empowered data governance committee, headed by the Chief Secretary, would provide strategic guidance for the data policy framework, while a data inter-departmental committee, headed by the Chief Executive Officer of Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA), would make the operational- level decisions emanating from the policy. The CEO of the TNeGA would be the State’s Chief Data Officer.
The policy would apply to all data and information created, generated, collected and archived using public funds of the government of Tamil Nadu directly or through authorised agencies by various departments/organizations and autonomous bodies. It will also apply to data that are recurring and generated owing to automation, and to legacy data available in non-machine-readable form.
As for personal data, the policy maintained, “The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, [introduced in the Lok Sabha] that seeks to regulate data production and sharing is yet to become a law, but certain aspects of the Bill, like personally identifiable information and sensitive personal information, will be a factor to consider when we start using data produced in the government to solve the above challenges.”
The policy also lays down the rules for access to non-open data. “Questions such as whether data are aggregated, who is going to use data, what data will be used for, whether data are personally identifiable, whether it has sensitive personal data are critical to determining access to the data.”
The State would adopt a mix of federated and centralised data storage, and critical master data, like the family database, would be stored centrally with appropriate safeguards and protection of personally identifiable information, such as removal of potentially identifiable characteristics and other statistical techniques. “Data shall be published in machine readable formats, such as csv, xml and json, to minimise the use of PDFs,” the policy specified.
Though the policy maintained that it sought to encourage the dissemination and use of data “freely by sharing non-sensitive data as and when possible”, it indicated that certain amount of data would be priced. “The price of non-open data to be shared, if any, would be as per the policy of the Government of Tamil Nadu, and TNeGA shall be responsible for issuing instructions on data pricing.”
(A copy of the policy can be accessed at https://bit.ly/TNDataPolicy2022)
https: //bit.ly/TNDataPolicy2022)
