At a time when the world debates who will benefit from the data revolution, the Economic Survey has advocated “a government-driven data revolution.creating data as a public good”. Isolating “data” as a strategic focus for the first time, this survey has stated that in the sectors private players ignore because of no commercial profit, the government should step in. Citing examples from agriculture, citizen services and beneficiary schemes, it stated, “Because the private sector cannot internalize the social benefits of data in these sectors the market for data in these sectors has so far not developed. To ensure that the socially optimum amount of data is harvested and used, the government needs to step in, either by providing the data itself or correcting the incentive structure faced by the private sector, depending on the nature and sensitivity of data.” Explained: Economic Survey 2018-19 big ideas — Rationalise minimum wages architecture The survey has also discussed integrating data from across their ministerial silos into a “Data Access Fiduciary Architecture.” Taking pointers from London’s Tube data and former US President Barack Obama’s open government data initiative, the survey has detailed an example of a Ministry of Panchayati Raj initiative to assign codes to unaddressed local administrative units in rural India. It has outlined areas for improvement — digitising data in machine-readable formats, training government officials down to the district level about data analysis and creating scheme dashboards to visualise patterns in data. The “architecture” would focus on data that citizens consent to share or data that the government has allowed itself to collect for “an explicit purpose” such as tax collection. A draft data protection law released a year ago gives the government broad exceptions to the law for its functions and citizen services. The pending law is yet to be presented to the Cabinet. Explained: Economic Survey 2019 — new ideas to policy prescriptions The survey addressed privacy concerns by limiting ministry controls to their own respective datasets and allowing the citizen to opt out of some data collection categories. By “utilizing technological advances to eliminate all privacy concerns,” the survey stated, “The prospect of empowering the government with such comprehensive, exhaustive information about every citizen may sound alarming at first. However, this is far from the truth.” The survey not only called for government intervention because of lack of private action, but also positioned government as a protector of “data for the people” with the “citizens [being] the largest group of beneficiaries of the proposed data revolution”. The survey’s vision borrows from the Finance Ministry’s e-commerce policy’s idea of data for “citizen empowerment”. “Even if private sector were to put such rich data together, this would result in a monopoly that would reduce citizen welfare, on the one hand, and violate the principle of data by citizens, and, therefore, for citizens,” it read. The survey did not, however, preclude any data to be sold to the private sector for profit. “Undoubtedly, the data revolution envisioned here is going to cost funds . it is only fair to charge [private sector] for its use .. Alternatively, datasets may be sold to analytics agencies that process the data, generate insights, and sell the insights further to the corporate sector, . Fortunately, stringent technological mechanisms exist to safeguard data privacy and confidentiality even while allowing the private sector to benefit from the data,” it said.
