Forging a social contract for data

News: In February 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) released the Data India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 (or Draft Policy) for public consultation.  

What are the aims of the draft policy? 

It will help in overcoming a number of historical bottlenecks: (1) slow progress on the Open Government Data (OGD) platform, (2) fragmentation of data sets into departmental silos, (3) lack of data quality standards, licensing, and valuation frameworks to support data-sharing etc. 

It can help in informed decision-making, improvement in citizen-centric delivery of public services, and economy-wide digital innovation. 

What are the issues with the draft policy?

The Draft Policy is silent on the norms, rules, and mechanisms that are required to achieve the objectives. 

The draft policy allows transparency only in case of access to the non-personal data sets of the public data.

– It may lead to privacy or risk of data misuse due to transparency-accountability considerations, as some citizen data sets generated during service delivery also contain personal identifiers.

The anonymisation standards put on the personal data sets are insufficient safeguards against privacy risks.  

India has no personal data protection law. It makes it problematic to process the dataset. 

The government agencies treat themselves as ‘owners’ of the public data under The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). There is a lack of a data trusteeship framework. Therefore, NDSAP gives government agencies unilateral privileges to determine the terms of data licensing.  

The draft does not allow data-sharing from both public and private sector actors across various sectors. In fact, the private sector holds the most valuable data resources which can help in socioeconomic innovation. 

The laws and regulations related to competition are inadequate for the platform economy in India.  

What is the way forward? 

We need a new social contract for data whereby the government is the custodian or trustee. It would act as a fiduciary to promote data use for public good. It was also recommended by the 2020 Report of the MEITY Committee of Experts on non-personal data governance. 

a) democratisation of data value should be ensured through accountable institutional mechanisms for data governance. 

b) Voluntary data-sharing should be promoted between the Public and Private sector. For example, The European Union has created a common and interoperable data space for such purposes.

c) A data stewardship model can also be promoted. It refers to the use of high-value data sets. It was proposed by the MEITY’s Committee of Experts in their Report on Non-Personal Data Governance (2020).

– In this, a government/not-for-profit organisation should be allowed to request the Non-Personal Data Authority or NPDA for the creation of a high-value data sets.

d) There should be mandatory public access to private data in exceptional cases such as public emergencies. For instance, it has been suggested in EU’s proposed Data Act (2022).

Source: The post is based on an article “Forging a social contract for data” published in The Hindu on 26 Mar 22.