Comments on the draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy, 2022

Abstract

This paper presents our comments to the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India on the governments draft Data Sharing and Access Policy. The Policy seeks to revise the existing National Data Sharing and Access Policy of 2012. We argue that the draft fails to adequately identify lacunae in existing policy and instead attempts to encourage the commercial use of government data to the exclusion of other purposes (such as transparency and openness of government systems). We therefore provide various suggestions on how the proposed draft could be improved.

Keywords: open data, government data, data governance