IndiaAI: AI working group recommends govt to monetise sharing of non-personal data

The government claims that the India Datasets Platform will be one of the largest collections of anonymised datasets that can be used by Indian researchers to train AI models

A year after the government shied away from its plan to monetise the sharing of non-personal data following criticism from various quarters, the idea has been reintroduced in the government's roadmap to leverage artificial intelligence in the country.

One of the seven working groups that was formed by the government to build the core goals of the IndiaAI program, suggested that the government introduce a pricing model for sharing of data, including non-personal data, under the India Dataset Platform (IDP).

The IndiaAI program aims to bridge the gaps in the existing AI ecosystem and use the technology for the country's development. The IDP will be "one of the largest publicly assembled and anonymised datasets in the world" that can be used by various stakeholders such as startups, academia and so on.

"IDP can serve as a data marketplace where data providers can offer their datasets for sale or subscription," says the report of the working group that studied the India Dataset Platform (IDP). The working group's members include officials of MeitY, members of the industry and academia.

"Data providers can set pricing models, such as one-time purchases, subscriptions, or licensing fees, based on the value and uniqueness of
their datasets. The central platform facilitates the transactional process, handling payments, licensing agreements, and data access controls," the report adds.

The idea of monetising the sharing of data was first introduced in the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy of 2022. However, it was scraped after the pricing policy faced severe criticism from several stakeholders who had claimed that monetisation of data went against the principle of open government data.

Post that, in May 2022, the government released the revised National Data Governance Framework Policy, which did away with the idea to monetise such data.

The working group recommended that the pricing models for the datasets be decided under a pricing model monetization framework. The report says that data providers can choose flexible pricing options, such as a fixed price for a dataset for a specific period or a subscription-based pricing model.

The report also lists several other entities such as Amazon AWS Data Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Cloud Marketplace, World Bank Data Catalog, Google Cloud Public Datasets, where a price has to be paid to avail such datasets.

On the other hand, the European Union Open Data Portal offers a vast range of datasets for free.

While releasing the report on October 13, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, “After months of dedicated research, the seven working groups that were constituted to build the core goals of the IndiaAI program, have submitted their formal report today."

"This report lays out what will be the fulcrum of the IndiaAI strategy that was envisaged by PM Modi. He had talked about India for AI and AI for India. Through this roadmap IndiaAI will work to be a kinetic enabler of the 1 trillion dollar digital economy,” Chandrasekhar added.