Govt Pushes For Promotion Of Data Quality Index & Governance At G20

In the latest G20 Presidency working group meeting, India made a strong recommendation to promote institutions including the National Data Analytics Platform and Data Governance Quality Index.

The meeting was hosted by India’s Sherpa Amitabh Kant and attended by several international guests. India took over the G20 Presidency from Indonesia in 2022 and has been pushing for several new reforms in the tech segment.

According to Kant, “Every country needs to bring in a good data governance quality index. We have tried to build a national data analytics platform because a massive amount of data is available, but it is not in a usable format.”

He further stated that while government departments had terabytes of data, most of it was garbage as it was not in a form that could be used for analytics. “Government data is provided as an aggregate which is not good. We should break down the aggregates,” he said.

His comments have come shortly after the Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the Indian government would soon begin to assemble large sets of anonymised datasets, collected and armoured under the National Data Governance Framework Policy.

Furthermore, the government revealed its plans to unveil the framework and set new standards for the governance of citizens’ data by authorities. The policy would provide an institutional framework for data, datasets and metadata and rules, standards, guidelines and protocols for sharing of non-personal data sets while ensuring privacy, security and trust.

The Data Index will make all sets of data across institutions accessible to the government in machine-readable format with clear documentation. It will provide APIs to government departments that are reluctant to share data with the public, making quality governance and real-time data verification sharing a primary activity.

The data quality and governance practice announcement at G20, also comes shortly after the Indian government unveiled the draft of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill. The government has proposed the creation of an online redressal forum, a data protection board, rules for cross-border data transfers and more.