Govt to set up India Data Management Office

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) will set up an India Data Management Office (IDMO) under the Digital India Corporation (DIC) for framing, managing, reviewing and revising the National Data Governance Framework Policy.

The IDMO will also frame data, dataset and metadata rules in consultation with the respective ministries and state governments. The IDMO will develop and release a comprehensive and evolving set of standards for data storage, retention and management.

Last month, the government was in the process of coming out with an all-new framework for the governance of citizen’s data that would set standards for its storage, collection and use solely by the government.

As per the draft of the data governance framework, the IDMO will design and manage the India Datasets platform which will in turn handle the requests of Indian researchers and startups which require access to non-personal or anonymised datasets.

The draft has also proposed that all ministries and their respective departments have a separate Data Management Unit (DMU) headed by a chief data officer. The DMU will work closely with IDMO to implement the data governance framework policy.

The IDMO will also formulate disclosure norms for data collected, stored, shared and accessed over a certain threshold as well as define the principles of fair and ethical use of data shared beyond the government ecosystem, as per the draft.