The

Union Cabinet The Union Council of Ministers Article 58 of the ''Constitution of India'' is the principal executive organ of the Government of India, which is responsible for being the senior decision making body of the executive branch. It is chaired by t ...

approved the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) on 9 February 2012. The objective of the policy is to facilitate access to

Government of India The Government of India (ISO: ; often abbreviated as GoI), known as the Union Government or Central Government but often simply as the Centre, is the national government of the Republic of India, a federal democracy located in South Asia, c ...

owned shareable data and information in both

human readable A human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans. In computing, ''human-readable'' data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data. In most ...

and machine readable forms.

Scope

A large quantum of data generated using public funds by various organizations and institutions in the country remains inaccessible to the public, although most of such data may be non-sensitive in nature and could be used by public for scientific, economic and developmental purposes. There has been an increasing demand by the community, that such data collected with the deployment of public funds should be made more readily available to all, for enabling rational debate, better decision making and use in meeting civil society needs. The NDSAP policy is designed to promote data sharing and enable access to Government of India owned data for national planning, development and awareness. The National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) is applicable to all shareable non-sensitive data available either in digital or analog forms but generated using public funds by various ministries, departments, subordinate offices, organizations, and agencies of Government of India as well as of the states. The objective of this policy is to facilitate access to Government of India owned shareable data through a wide area network, thereby permitting a wider accessibility and usage by public. The principles on which data sharing and accessibility need to be based include: openness, flexibility, transparency, quality, security and efficiency,. The motivation behind this policy is

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

Rio Declaration on Environment and Development The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, often shortened to Rio Declaration, was a short document produced at the 1992 United Nations "Conference on Environment and Development" (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit. The Rio Decl ...

, Principle 10: "''Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities,...and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available.''" and

Right to Information Act, 2005 The Right to Information (RTI) is an act of the Parliament of India which sets out the rules and procedures regarding citizens' right to information. It replaced the former Freedom of Information Act, 2002. Under the provisions of RTI Act, an ...

, Section 4 (2): "''It shall be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps in accordance with the requirements of clause (b) of sub-section (1) to provide as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communications, including internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information.''". Some state governments such as Sikkim, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Assam, etc. have created their own policy on the lines of NDSAP.

Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India

The open government data initiative started in India with the notification of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), submitted to the

by the Department of Science and Technology, on 17 March 2012. The NDSAP identified the Department of Electronics & Information Technology as the nodal department for the implementation of the policy through

National Informatics Centre The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is an Indian government department under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). The NIC provides infrastructure, IT Consultancy, IT Services including but not limited to architecti ...

, while the Department of Science and Technology continues to be the nodal department on policy matters. In pursuance of the Policy, the '
Open Government Data Platform India
'' was launched in 2012. "OGD Platform India" is a platform for supporting

open data Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...

initiative of

. The platform has been set up to provide collated access to resources (datasets/apps) under catalogs, published by different government entities in

open format An open file format is a file format for storing digital data, defined by an openly published specification usually maintained by a standards organization, and which can be used and implemented by anyone. Open file format is licensed with open lic ...

. The portal is intended to be used by Government of India ministries, departments and their organizations to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use. The base "Open Government Data Platform India" is a joint initiative of

and

Federal government of the United States The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fede ...

. The current version launched on 11 December 2014 is the stable release of the platform. After the launch of the

Digital India Digital India is a campaign launched by the Government of India in order to ensure that the Government's services are made available to citizens electronically by improved online infrastructure and by increasing Internet connectivity or making ...

program in 2015, "Open Government Data Platform India" has been included as one of the important initiatives under Pillar 6 – "Information for All".

Government Open Data License – India

While appropriate open formats and related aspects for implementation of the policy has been defined in the "NDSAP implementation guidelines" prepared by an inter-ministerial task force constituted by the

, the open license for data sets published under NDSAP and through the OGD Platform remained unspecified. The license '
Government Open Data License – India
'' is published as an "Extraordinary Gazette" in February 2017. The license ensures that the data released are not misused or misinterpreted, and that all users have the same and permanent right to use the data. Government Open Data License – India (GODL-India) is applicable to "all shareable non-sensitive data available either in digital or analog forms but generated using public funds by various agencies of the Government of India". The license permits anyone to "use, adapt, publish (either in original, or in adapted and/or derivative forms), translate, display, add value, and create derivative works (including products and services), for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes". In return, the user must acknowledge the provider, source, and license of data by explicitly publishing the attribution statement, including the DOI (

Digital object identifier A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they a ...

), or the URL (

Uniform Resource Locator A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...

), or the URI (

Uniform Resource Identifier A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is a unique sequence of characters that identifies a logical or physical resource used by web technologies. URIs may be used to identify anything, including real-world objects, such as people and places, conc ...

) of the data concerned. The license does not cover the following kinds of data: a.

personal information Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted in the United States, but the phrase it abbreviates ha ...

; b. data that is non-shareable and/or sensitive; c. names, crests, logos and other official symbols of the data provider(s); d. data subject to other

intellectual property rights Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

, including

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

s, trade-marks and official marks; e.

military insignia A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...

; f.

identity documents An identity document (also called ID or colloquially as papers) is any document that may be used to prove a person's identity. If issued in a small, standard credit card size form, it is usually called an identity card (IC, ID card, citizen ca ...

; and g. any data that should not have been publicly disclosed for the grounds provided under section 8 of the

References

External links

Ministry of Science and Technology A Science Ministry or Department of Science is a ministry or other government agency charged with science. The ministry is often headed by a Minister for Science. List of Ministries of Science Many countries have a Ministry of Science or Ministry ...

. March 2012. Gazette of India
National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) 2012 (Gazette Notification)Open Government Data (OGD) Platform (India) – data.gov.in
*

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is an executive agency of the Union Government of the Republic of India. It was carved out of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on 19 July 2016 as a standalon ...

. February 2017. Gazette of India
Government Open Data License – India (Gazette Notification)Implementation guidelines for National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP)Official website of Registrar of Copyright

Indian Copyright Act, 1957: Full textSection 28 in the Copyright Act, 1957 – Term of copyright in Government works
{{DEFAULTSORT:National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy - Government of India

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

Law of India Indian intellectual property law

Scope

Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India

Government Open Data License – India

See also

References

External links