Finance Minister of India, Nirmala Sitharaman on the 1st of February while giving the Budget 2023 speech stated that the Indian government will be coming up with a National Data Governance Policy. In order to help academia and start-ups with anonymized data. Therefore, there is a certain need for data governance policy to help startups and academia in India which we will be discussing in further sections. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that for unleashing innovation and research by startups and academia, a data governance policy will be enrolled. This will be enabling access to anonymized data.
In addition, in 2022, the IT ministry issued a fresh draft of the National Data Governance Framework Policy (NDGFP) with a higher importance on sharing non-personal data. In order to build a large repository of India-specific datasets for use by researchers and start-ups.
Data Governance Policy to Help Startups and Academia in India
As part of the framework, a platform will be designed. Which will facilitate processing requests and providing access to non-personal and/or anonymised datasets to Indian researchers and startups.
Earlier, MeitY had issued a draft policy on the same. However, retracted it after the ministry faced extensive criticism over planning for monetizing the sharing of data. Whereas, the new draft does not have provisions for data monetization.
According to the part of the policy, the Indian government will also construct the India Datasets program. Which will be consisting of non-personal and anonymised datasets from Government entities. That have collected data from Indian citizens or those in India.
Minister of State in IT and Electronics ministry Rajeev Chandrasekhar explained that this data will not be made available to foreign or Big Tech companies On February 1st.
Building the data governance policy to help startups and academia in India. The National Data Governance Policy is to do with quality for managing and storing government data including anonymisation standards.
What is Data Governance?
Simply put, data governance is the method of managing the usability, availability, integrity, and security of all company data. Therefore, by deploying data governance policy to help startups and academia, it will be ultimately supporting the individuals concerned with working in the sector.
Ultimately, the objective of data governance is to make sure that the right people within the organization are having access to clean and consistent data. That they are able to use for making operational decisions. On the other hand, proper data governance will also be helping in safeguarding the data from unauthorized access and controls the level of access for different people within the organization.
With this definition in mind, it’s safe to say that several startups and SMBs should start paying more attention to data governance.
How Will it Help?
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI ML) is a big area and future of every single industry. The big challenge with AIML however is for accessing dat. For you to be able to validate the outcomes and run algorithms. You require enormous amounts of data, be it in the medical industry, banking, or cybersecurity stated Pankit Desai, CEO & Co-founder Sequretek.
Therefore, for startups in this area, you do not have the wherewithal for getting access to data. The ability to have access to anonymised data will be a phenomenal potential. That really should aid overall AIML research, solutions, outcomes, companies, everything becomes considerably better, Desai added.
Where as, data governance policy to help startup and academia in India has the potential to to safeguard personal data privacy and security. While also highlighting data accessibility and interoperability. It will be promoting data-driven innovation. Therefore, it is also enhancing transparency and accountability, and improves data quality and reliability.
Wrapping up
Data governance policy to help start-ups and academia in India may sound like a big and scary issue for most startups and scaleups. However, in the end, the objective is to make data more secure, consistent, accessible, and clean. Which in turn will be improving operational decision-making.
And that’s what we all need, correct?
As with anything, the best way to start with data governance is step by step. Start by assigning an owner, having them build a “data treasure map”, and educating your entire workforce of the changes. After that, data governance will be becoming an iterative process. Where requiring for revising the treasure map every three to six months.
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