Open data relates to the idea of keeping data freely available for usage, remixing, and wider distribution.
About the ‘National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy'(NDSAP) policy:
- Legal backing– It came into existence in 2012, and is empowered by the Section 4(2) of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, and makes it the responsibility of every public authority to share their data and information suo motu at regular intervals.
- Agencies involved-Ministry of Science and Technology has formulated the NDSAP.
- DST continues to be the nodal department on policy matters.
- Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) is the nodal Ministry to implement the policy through NIC.
- Applicability- All non-personal, non-sensitive data produced using public funds by the central, state, and local governments, and their departments.
- Principles: openness, transparency, quality, privacy, and machine readability.
- Objective- To provide proactive access to Government owned shareable data along with its usage information in open/machine readable format, through a wide area of network across the country, in a periodically updated manner, within the framework of various related policies, rules, and acts of the Government.
- Developed using Open Source Stack, the project is one of the initiatives under Pillar 6 (Information for All) of the Digital India initiative.
Types of data under the policy: As per policy each department has to prepare it’s Negative List.
- The datasets which are confidential in nature and are in the interest of the country’s security in not
opening to the public would fall into the negative list. - All other datasets which do not fall under this negative list would be in the Open List. These datasets would need to be prioritized into high value datasets and non-high value datasets.
Types of Access:
- Open Access – Access to data generated from public funding should be easy, timely, user-friendly and web-based without any process of registration / authorization.
- Registered Access – Datasets which are accessible only through a prescribed process of registration / authorization by respective departments / organizations will be available to the recognized institutions / organizations / public users, through defined procedures.
- Restricted Access – Data declared as restricted, by Government of India policies, will be accessible only through and under authorization.
India’s “open government data (OGD) platform” works under the provisions of the NDSAP.
- MeitY through NIC has set up the Open Government Data (OGD) Platform.
- It is used by various government departments to publish data sets.
Main objectives of OGD are:
i) Provisioning an enabling Platform to provide proactive and open access to the data generated through public funds by departments/ organizations of Government of India.
ii) To increase Transparency, Accountability, Citizen Engagement, Collaboration, Better Governance, Decision making & Innovation.
iii) Paradigm Shift in Governance – Direct Delivery of Services to Citizen, Setting up a Platform for Collaboration, Innovation in delivery of Services to Citizen.
Main features of OGD platform:
- Single point access to open datasets;
- Responsive Web Layout design, Enhanced Visualization Platform;
- Efficient discoverability of resources, Cataloging of Similar resources, APIs;
- Widgets to share filtered set of catalogs, Catalogs Subscription;
- Community participation through Forums, Blogs, Infographics and Visualizaion and much more.
