The Beginnings of India's Own Open Data Movement | iGovernment.in

In a novel initiative, the Indian Planning Commission recently announced that in conjunction with the National Innovation Council, it would be hosting a 32-hour ‘Hackathon’. The event, which will be held on April 6 and 7, 2013 invites students and professionals from all walks of life to come and aid the government in visualising India’s 12th Five Year Plan. To be held at all major universities across the country, as well as online, the hackathon is the government’s attempt to encourage citizens towards using publically-available data and information and hacking it into visualisations, apps and short films, with the aim of creating awareness on important socio-political issues in the country.  The Planning Commission’s announcement of India’s first official hackathon comes just a month after over 120 cities around the world celebrated the second International Open Data day on February 23, 2013. Numerous cities hosted similar hackathons, inviting developers, data scientists, social entrepreneurs, and government employees as well as designers, bloggers, students, and other open data enthusiasts to take part in it ... In May 2012, the governments of the United States and India launched an Open Government Platform (OGPL), an open source version of the US government’s Data.gov platform, for helping governments across the globe make data public. Teams from both countries – from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in India, and from Data.gov in the US – collaborated over a six-month period to develop the platform.  India then launched its own open data site, Data.gov.in in September last year. The site is part of the country’s commitment to provide open and transparent access to data collected by various government departments and agencies, as outlined in the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012.  The stated advantages, as envisioned by the policy, include maximisation the use of data, avoidance and minimisation of duplication of efforts on its collection, facilitating integration by leading to common standards, providing ownership information, faster and better decision making and, of course, equitable access to information by all citizens.  The data.gov.in site today has 180 datasets, provided by 17 departments. Communities have been established to focus on the three key segments of Agriculture, Health and Developers ... Lastly, government departments and agencies are often reluctant and slow in releasing data. In India, after more than five months of its launch, data.gov.in only has added 167 datasets in over five months, averaging at just one dataset a day. Government agencies are not completely at fault either, as most of the data they have is not stored in a machine readable format and has to be converted and cleaned before uploading it on to the open data portal.

Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure & Innovations, is of the view that while the government hoped to release data on a wide variety of topics such as transportation, water, sanitation, railways and more; government data in India remains under copyright and it would take time for different ministries and departments to warm up to the idea of sharing their information freely with the public.  Moreover, as pointed out by Kapil Sibal, India’s Minister for Communications and IT, India faces an enormous challenge when it comes to the standardisation of government data ..."