India Internet News
New Governmental Portal Helps You To Find Information Easily
04 June 2011
All public informations, such as glacier meltdowns, monsoon reports, benami land, etc. will be freely accessible with a single mouse click by the introduction of a national information portal later this month.
Based on US CIO Vivek Kundra's Data.gov.us project, the new website of science and technology ministry, named data.gov.in, targets to present information , and make the government more "open".
Major General (Dr) Siva Kumar, the chief of the ministry's Natural Resources Data Management System, says, "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."
Previous information which is not digitized until now will be displayed on portal as "existing inside departments". Kumar says, "Citizens can go and collect hard copies of it. New data will all be available as metadata links to portals of other ministries."
According to the draft policy note on the issue, "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."
Information will be categorized in several sections: negative lists, unsharable data, raw data, meta data, restricted, spatial and unique data.
Limited access will be given to certain agencies with passwords. This information might contain coordinates of strategic places, sensitive archaeological, cultural and historical places. Information on the new website will be available within 3 months of collection.
Field remarks, project-related information studies, review results and results of lab tests will be provided to the public.
Some information like number of endangered species and their places might have restricted access. Information related to legal and intellectual property is possibly to be under limited access. Spatial information will involve maps, information about natural resources, land use and demography.