Data Governance Policy: Govt may soon begin assembling anonymised datasets, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Image: Twitter/@Rajeev_Goi)

The Indian government is all set to collect large sets of anonymised databases under the National Data Governance Framework Policy with which it aims to support startups and governments, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT.

Speaking at the 1st Development Working Group Meeting at the G20 Summit in Mumbai on December 13, Chandrasekhar said, “A major data initiative that India is on the verge of launching…Indian government will soon begin to assemble large sorts of anonymised datasets collected and harmonised under our National Data Governance Framework Policy. With the vast community of Indian start-ups and researchers and the country’s AI ecosystem, we expect this large database to be increasingly used by companies to train their AI models. Our aim is to catalyse innovation and create more effective policy and pragmatic solutions.”

“And amongst the use cases for these datasets will be government and governance solutions, applying innovative technologies to datasets with far reaching impact on on-ground development interventions at all levels including farthest villages, cities and towns ushering a new era of digital government,” he added.

According to Chandrasekhar, this new policy will have certain beneficial effects. For instance, “It will standardise management access, control and security of data on an unprecedented scale”. He said that the response and resilience of Indians in the last two years of Covid pandemic was largely driven and aided by the investments in technology and innovations over the several years preceding that.

“These demonstrable benefits of technology and creation of the India stack that is built on the identity authenticity layer of Aadhaar and the UPI platforms and on top of which are layered with multiple applications related to health, education and skilling -- are clearly driving India’s further acceleration of digitisation of governance and in turn being available of data for better governance,” he explained addressing the foreign delegates and dignitaries present.

Chandrasekhar sees major use cases of such data bases in governance applications using drones and aerial footage for better mapping of physical assets and properties; and larger development of geospatial authentication platforms.