National Data Governance Framework Policy

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Table of contents

Context (TH): The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) released the National Data Governance Framework Policy (NPD Framework).
As per a NASSCOM report, data and artificial intelligence (AI) can add approximately $450-500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025.

NPD Framework

Kris Gopalakrishnan committee: The committee discussed the risks of de-anonymising NPD, the institutionalisation of a central authority for NPD, and ownership and data sharing mechanisms.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) released the National Data Governance Framework Policy (NPD Framework) based on this.
Data businesses: This is a new category of business in the country. Entities (including government agencies) that collect, process, or store data beyond a threshold will be classified as data businesses.
Sharing of non-personal data: Data-sharing requests for sovereign, public interest, or economic purposes may be made with or without remuneration, depending on processing cost.
Open metadata: Sharing metadata, including government metadata, to encourage innovation.

Abstract high-level principles and objectives: Lacks tangible, actionable guidance to achieve.
Rights and obligations: Silent on stakeholder rights and obligations across sectors.
Pricing and legal mechanisms: Such structures and solutions for data exchange are not addressed.
The absence of standardised governance tools aggravates challenges.

Unprotected inter-flow of NPD across various stakeholders makes it vulnerable to privacy breaches.
The imperfect analysis of crucial public trends can result in faulty decision-making.
Inefficient data fails to unlock the power of interdisciplinary legislative and policy-making.
By creating a regulatory design for data exchanges in India, public welfare functions can be digitised and automated to a large extent.
This will reduce administrative burden and facilitate inter-sectoral integration, making the digitisation of civic functions more participatory.
Still, no policy provides for an enforceable regime for NPD in India.

Telangana has designed an agriculture data exchange.
Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs has established the India Urban Data Exchange in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science.
Department of Science & Technology has announced its intention to set up data exchanges to implement aspects of the National Geospatial Policy.

Personal Data: Contains identifiers through which an individual can be mapped.
Non-Personal Data (NPD): Data which excludes personal data.
NPD constitutes the primary kind of citizen data obtained by the government, which has the potential to serve as a ‘public good’.

Public NPD: Data collected or generated by the government in the course of publicly funded works. For example, anonymised data from land records or vehicle registration can be considered public non-personal data.
Community NPD: Raw or factual data (without any processing) sourced from a community of natural persons (ex., municipal corporations or public electric utilities).
Private NPD: Data collected or generated by private entities through privately owned processes (derived insights, algorithms, or proprietary knowledge).

Data principal: The entity to whom the non-personal data relates. This entity can be an individual, a community, or a company.
Data custodian: Collects, stores, and processes data in the best interest of the data principal.
Data trustee: Representative entity through which Data principals may exercise their rights.