The Centre is likely looking to define the "ownership" of non-personal data held by Big Tech and formulate a policy framework if they refuse to share such data with a regulator, according to a report by The Indian Express.
As per the draft National Data Governance Framework, announced by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in May, Big Tech giants such as Google, Meta and Amazon will be required to share non-personal data with a regulator "for the benefit of startups in the country".
According to the report, a MeitY-appointed committee headed by Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan had proposed the idea of reaping economic benefits from aggregated non-personal datasets. In a draft report of January 2021, the committee had recommended the identification of certain "high value datasets" that could be shared for the purpose of encouraging innovation and ensuring national security.
Non-personal datasets refer to data that does not contain personally identifiable information such as the overall health data of a particular demography, weather and climate data of an area, and traffic data.
The department had proposed to set up an India Data Management Office (IDMO) that would act as a regulator and process requests and provide access to non-personal datasets for Indian researchers and startups.
"Once we have a functional IDMO, the government will share all the non-personal data in its possession with it. As a second step, we will request private companies to also share certain datasets with the IDMO. In case they refuse, then the government might get into the ownership of such data and how private companies can claim exclusive ownership over it," a senior official told the publication.
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