New Govt portal Data.Gov.In launch next month to ease information search

All public data-from that on glacier meltdowns to monsoon charts to benami land--will be freely available at the click of a mouse with the launch of a national data portal next month.

Modeled on US chief information officer Vivek Kundra's Data.gov.us project, the science and technology ministry's portal-- data.gov.in--aims to democratize data, and make the government more 'open'.

'We plan to launch data.gov.in by next month. Once the National Data Sharing and Accesibility policy is approved by the cabinet, citizens will be able to see datasets from various ministries being put up,' said Major General (Dr) Siva Kumar, head of the ministry's Natural Resources Data Management System.

Past data that is not digitized yet will show on portal as 'existing inside departments'. 'Citizens can go and collect hard copies of it. New data will all be available as metadata links to portals of other ministries,' Kumar said.

'There is a large quantum of data generated at the cost of public funds by various organisations and institutions. Most of the data is non-sensitive and can be used by public for scientific, economic and developmental programmes. The national data sharing and accessibility policy is designed to apply to all non-classified data held by various ministries, departments and subordinate offices,' states the draft policy note on the issue.

Information will be classified into various categories: negative lists, unsharable data, raw data, meta data, restricted, spatial and unique data.

Restricted access will be provided to certain agencies with passwords. Such data may include coordinates of strategic locations, sensitive archaeological, cultural and historical locations. Data on the new portal will be available within three months of collection.

Field observations, project-related data studies, survey results and results of lab tests will be available to the public.

Some data such as number of endangered species and their locations may have restircted access. Information related to legal and intellectual property is likely to be under restricted access. Spatial data will include maps, data about natural resources, land use and demography.