A New Tryst With Destiny: Birth of a Data Democracy

Context: Data democracy presents a paradigm change putting people at the center and delivering economic empowerment to the otherwise poor population of India.

Recent committees on data governance: The principle behind the following committees is the same: data generated by the public has to be protected and cannot be harvested for free—as it is at present.

• Kris Gopalakrishnan Committee: Argued for a separate law to regulate the commercial use of non-personal data.

• B.N. Srikrishna Committee: Argued for legislation to regulate the use of personal information by data-mining companies.

Need for data democracy: 

• Placing Individual at the Centre of India’s digital future: Recommendations of both the above panels is to put the individual at the centre of data governance.

• • • Individual consent would be the precondition for online companies like Google and Facebook, which currently harvest data mostly without consent 

• Delivering Economic Empowerment: A circumstance in which data will be harvested for public and personal wealth creation.

• Utilizing the Data-Richness: Indians are economically poor but data-rich. This mismatch in potential and reality is what provides an opportunity for an individual to monetize their data.

• Already established building blocks: The following two building blocks of data democracy are already in place and need to be integrated with privacy considerations.

• First block: Aadhaar provided the idea of a unique identity to over 1 billion people in India.
• Second block: Paired with an interoperable payments mechanism, such as the Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, to give a new definition to financial transactions.

• Leveraging data for public and personal good: It helps in reducing Knowledge Asymmetry: 

• For E.g. The micro, small, and medium scale enterprises’ (MSMEs) failure in getting loans from banks due to the absence of collaterals as security is due to the information gap.
• This knowledge asymmetry is removed when MSME deploys data by consenting to financial intermediaries mining through its digital history.

Conclusion: The onus is on the politicians to fast track the privacy law protecting and regulating the use of personal and non-personal data.