National Data Governance Framework Policy (NDGF)- UPSC Current Affairs

Why in the News?

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a draft titled as ‘National Data Governance Framework Policy’ (NDGF) outlining its data governance policy.

Key Points

About National Data Governance Framework Policy (NDGF) 

• Purpose: To manage the “safe availability” of non-personal data from government and private entities for the use of researchers and innovators and to accelerate digital governance.
• Aim: To transform and modernize government data collection and management by defining guidelines for its sourcing, processing, storage, access and use to improve services in healthcare, education, agriculture, and law. 

Also read our yesterday's edition of Current Affairs on India-Gulf Ties.

Key Features

• Collating and sourcing Data: The Government has proposed an India Datasets programme — a central repository of anonymized non-personal datasets gathered by central ministries and departments from Indian citizens or those living in the country. 
• Applicability:
  • Central Government: 
    • The policy will apply to all ministries and Central government departments. 
    • It will include the collating of all non-personal data collected and managed by the Centre. 
    • Government entities will have to identify and classify datasets available with them to build a common repository.
  • State Government:
    • State Governments are encouraged to adopt the policy provisions. 
    • Private entities are also encouraged to share data collected by them on Indian citizens and residents with this central repository. 
• The repository:
  •  The India Datasets programme will be set up, designed and managed by the India Data Management Office (IDMO).
  • According to the draft, all datasets in the India Datasets programme would be accessible through a common central platform and any other platform designated by the IDMO. 
  • The platform will receive and process any requests for non-personal data.
• Data access and availability: 
  • The IDMO shall be responsible for the creation of protocols for sharing non-personal datasets via the datasets programme while also safeguarding privacy.

Concerns

• Ambiguity over IDMO Composition: The draft policy only mentions that the IDMO will be staffed by a “dedicated government data management and analytics unit”.
• Safeguarding Data Privacy: The NDGFP draft states that its standards and rules will ensure data security and information privacy but doesn’t state in detail how the government plans to safeguard data privacy.
  • The expert committee in its report had earlier flagged risks associated with non-personal data.

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What is Non-Personal Data?

• Non-personal data can be described as a set of information which doesn’t have any personal details that can trace the person.
• The Draft Data Protection Bill 2019 defined it as “any data other than personal data.”

Classifying Non-Personal Data

• The categorization was mentioned by a government-constituted expert committee in its report on the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework.
• Non-personal data is divided into three sections — public, community, and private.
  • Non-Personal data: While data collected by the government during the course of its working comes under public non-personal data.
  • Community non-personal data: A set of raw and unprocessed information sourced from a community is community non-personal data. 
  • Private non-personal data: It is data with private entities derived through applied knowledge or algorithms. 

Conclusion

• The NDGFP is the first building block step of the Digital Government Architecture that in turn will accelerate Digital Governance to maximize data-driven governance. 
• The NDGFP shall provide greater scope for better, more informed decision making, enhanced program/scheme evaluation and more efficient service delivery. 
• NDGFP will also serve to catalyze the Data and Al start-up and innovation Ecosystem by helping create and access to anonymized and non-personal data sets that will in turn spur research, innovation and growth of the Indian Data and Al based research and startup Ecosystem. 

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