Shillong, Sept 12: A one day regional workshop for northeastern states on implementation of ‘Open Government Data & National Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy’ (NDSAP) was inaugurated today by the Meghalaya Chief Secretary, Mr. W M S Pariat at the Conference Hall, Main Secretariat, Shillong in the presence of the Additional Chief Secretary, P B O Warjri, Principal Secretary, RM Mishra, Commissioner & Secretary IT, D P Wahlang and Alka Mishra of the NPI & Data Portal Team, NIC, New Delhi.
The workshop organized by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), National Informatics Centre, Meghalaya State Unit, Government of India witnessed a number of officials from different government departments of the State and the North Eastern States.
Open Government Data Portal is an open source product aimed at democratizing access of Government data in open format and energize civic engagement. It is setup at http://data.gov.in and was launched in compliance with the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) of India to provide single point access to datasets published by various government entities. Its main objective is to enable proactive dissemination of Open Government datasets for use and reuse by citizens and to promote transparency, accountability and citizen engagement in governance.
The Meghalaya Chief Secretary, WMS Pariat in his inauguration address said that in this era of information revolution, it is pertinent to disseminate information where people can gain easy access adding that Open Government Platform (OGPL) is a first step towards this end as it will transfer power to the citizen by seamless data sharing.
“This platform would have a significant impact on improving governance, enhancing accountability and generating greater collaborations between the government and the citizens,” Pariat said further urging the government officials that while generating data, authenticity of data is needed to ensure that data are accurate because it may have a negative impact to the end-users. By having citizen-government collaboration, the government can know the minds of the citizens through feedbacks and suggestions.
According to Alka Mishra NPI & Data Portal Team, NIC, New Delhi, “Open Government Data is a national initiative announced by the Government of India in March 2012 as it felt that the government data should be readily made available for the public. But through the NDSAP, it is mandatory for all government departments to release their datasets, with the exception of confidential data relating to nations security, in human readable and machine readable forms through a network in a proactive and periodically updatable manner.”
NDSAP implementation in India is being executed by NIC, DeitY in close coordination with DST. Through this portal there is an apps challenge where the civil societies, academicians, students and the like can mash up one government department with another department to come up with some visualization and suggestions to bring healthy governance.
Expressing his hope that Meghalaya will be the first state to implement the Open Government Data and NDSAP in full form the Commissioner Secretary IT, DP Wahlang said, “Open Government Platform (OGPL) originated from the visit of the President of USA, Barrack Obama to India in November 2010; this democratization of data will lead to a concept of community engagement where the government can get feedbacks and suggestions to bring about government-citizens collaboration.(SP News)
