IndiaAI Working Group Recommends Monetisation Of Non-Personal Data

A working group of the government’s artificial intelligence (AI) think tank, IndiaAI, has recommended sharing non-personal data. This comes a year after the government shelved such plans following widespread criticism. 

The idea has now been reintroduced in the government’s roadmap to leverage AI in the country.

According to the report presented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Friday (October 13), the working group has suggested that the government introduce a pricing model for sharing data, including non-personal data, under the India Dataset Platform (IDP). 

The working group is one of the seven set up by IndiaAI to prepare a roadmap for AI adoption in India, with its members including MeitY officials, industry members and academia. The report has said that the IDP will be ‘one of the largest publicly assembled and anonymised datasets in the world’ that can be used by stakeholders such as startups and academia.

The report has also suggested that IDP can serve as a data marketplace. The IndiaAI working group has recommended deciding the pricing for the datasets under a pricing model monetisation framework. Data providers can choose flexible pricing options, such as a fixed price for a dataset for a specific period or a subscription, as per the report.

“Data providers can set pricing models, such as one-time purchases, subscriptions, or licensing fees, based on the value and uniqueness of their datasets. The central platform facilitates the transactional process, handling payments, licensing agreements, and data access controls,” the report says.

It has also mentioned several other entities, such as Amazon AWS Data Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Cloud Marketplace and Google Cloud Public Datasets, where access to datasets comes at a price.

While releasing the report, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, “After months of dedicated research, the seven working groups constituted to build the core goals of the IndiaAI program have submitted their formal report today.”

Chandrasekhar also noted that the report will be the kinetic enabler of a $1 Tn digital economy.

The other working groups have made some important suggestions as well, including setting up 24,500 GPUs of computing infrastructure, supporting the development of AI chips under the Indian Semiconductor Mission (ISM), establishing the proposed centres of excellence (CoEs) and developing the institutional framework on governing data collection, management, processing and storage by the National Data Management Office (NDMO). 

Data sharing, however, is not an idea discussed for the first time. The Centre introduced the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy in 2022. However, the government scrapped the bill after the pricing policy faced severe criticism from several stakeholders, who claimed that data monetisation was against the principle of open government data.

After that, in May 2022, the government released the revised National Data Governance Framework Policy, which did not include any monetisation framework.