Apart from the Personal Data Protection Bill, which is in the process of being presented to Parliament, the government also intends to spell out the definition of non-personal data (anonymised data). This means that firms will not be free to just remove the name of the users from any data set, make it anonymous, and use it for any commercial purpose. They will have to abide by the norms put in place by the government.
The India Data Management Office (IDMO) will prescribe the standards by which the companies will have to anonymise the data and then use it for commercial purposes, for research and development, innovations etc, according to government officials.
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Earlier this month, the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) set up a task force for framing draft roadmap to develop artificial intelligence ecosystem by April end. The India AI programme aims at providing the publicly available datasets to the startups and researchers. “We need to design a national AI data platform, making data held by government organisations and the private sector available to researchers and innovation,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT during the first consultation on IndiaAI programme.
“The India dataset has a particular relevance that has not been seen elsewhere. There’s a perception that if we can do this right it will be a gold standard of datasets,” Chandrasekhar said, adding that the government will decide the criteria for giving the companies access to use the government as well as private datasets.
In the Union Budget of 2023-24, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the National Data Governance Policy. “To unleash innovation and research by startups and academia, a National Data Governance Policy will be brought out. This will enable access to anonymised data,” Sitharaman said while presenting the Budget.
In May last year, the IT ministry released a draft of the National Data Governance Policy. The policy also included setting up of the India Data Management Office and laid out guidelines related to sharing of non-personal data by private companies.
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Now, under the IndiaAI programme, the government will also formulate the design of the India Data Management Office in order to pave way for data-driven decision making, and innovation & research.
Apart from the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill and regulations around non-personal data, the government is working on the Digital India